Nightmares that do not end

 OMFG, as the kids say, this publishing process in peer reviewed journals is just the worst. 

I finally got the proof back from a journal where the article had been accepted way back in July. The proof had 29 corrections that needed to be made, including every figure, which had to be redone to be at 600 dpi, not 300 dpi. I had checked their art guidelines way back when I first submitted, and the requirements were 300 dpi, but they changed the requirements. So I had to go into all of my code in R and re-do the actual analyses to generate new figures, because my tech setup for graphics really sucks. And when I re-did the central analysis in the whole study, the results were different. 

I still do not know what the everloving hot damn is going on with that, as I used the exact same code and the exact same inputs as I have in dozens of fully reproducible iterations. I emailed the authors of the package in R that I am using, asking if they have changed the algorithms or other aspects. The only thing changed on my end was updating my version of R and R studio. 

Anyway, I changed the necessary portions of the proof, and submitted. But the project had me up until 1 a.m. and reminded me of the seriously soul wounding traumas of my dissertation completion that stretched over 15 months or so. The endless revisions, the endless incompetence on my part, the endless frustrations in trying to get software to do very fucking simple things, the endless despair of feeling like it would just...never end. I realize the proofing stage is the *last stage* and if I just get through this hurdle, the article will be published. But I am so done with this particular study, and the last thing I needed was for the analysis to produce different fucking results using the exact same inputs and the exact same code. What the actual fuck is that about? It is exactly how my entire life went for months on end, over and over, as the chaos demons in Hades presented me with all kinds of bizarre challenges that not even my committee members could figure out. I mean, fuck, the whole reason to do data analysis in R is to have 100% reproducible results. To use the exact same code and inputs and get a different output is theoretically not even possible. I look forward to hearing from the authors of the code. The resulting model that I produced was better than my original, but it's still disconcerting as fuck. 

And working with graphics is my Achilles heel for sure. No one bothered to tell me that a huge part of the PhD competencies in science now involve expert knowledge in figure creation, working with high resolution, and manipulating images. I got precisely zero training in any of that. And it turns out that the most popular platform for generating graphics for science articles is R, and *it is not possible to produce high resolution images in fucking R*. The work around that people use is to export a graphic as a pdf, and then do a high resolution conversion to a jpeg. That just seems so entirely fucking stupid to me I literally am unable to even. 

So I went to bed at 1 a.m. and felt great despair and agitation. It took a long time to fall asleep. I woke up instantly aggravated at about 7 and it took me four hours to finish revisions in the proof. I re-submitted it, but fully expect there will still be problems. Who knows. 

The whole feeling is like Sartre's No Exit, except instead of hell being other people, it's manuscripts and editors. It's great to be headed toward publishing, and it will be good leverage for future endeavors, but hot damn it is the single most exacting and arduous series of tasks I have ever tried. 

It's no help that the paper I am proofing included eight fucking images. Jesus. An example of one of the images is below. It's a prediction map of suitable habitat for my study species. The color shading ranges from pretty much zero habitat suitability to perfect, in dark green. I swear I have generated this prediction map seven hundred goddamned bajillion times. This one is 600 dpi. Hooray. 

The reminders of the long and despairing stretch of dissertation completion are also of course reminders of my general state of being at that time. It's good to note that I am "doing better" now than I was then. Marginally. The memory of sailing blind through manuscript preparation of this self-same article way back in January while staying at the old motel up in Bishop came back big time. Nine months ago. Nuts. 

The rest of today is dedicated to self care in the form of sleep, groceries, and a hair cut if I can fit it in. The old Persian barber down the street is probably open. Getting back into having food around rather than relying on takeout has been a real pleasure. I'm still in this daily feeling of being a few steps behind every goddamned thing though. 

Hiraeth UND Herzlandschaft

 WHY NOT BOTH?

Autumn rolls in, even here in the City of Angels, with, finally, cooler nights and less smoke from fires, and cloudy, overcast skies. Autumn is always a season of remembrance for me, nothing special there, I think it has this effect on many people. It's in the shortening of days and cooler temps and the approach of the Day of the Dead and Halloween. The natural cycle is to look back. Or to be back in one's imagination. Herzlandschaft, a landscape of the heart (pace Rilke) und hiraeth, the grand Welsh word for nostalgic homesickness, which, apparently, can also apply to homesickness for a place one has never been. I love that connotation especially, and especially these days. 

Cherokee Regional Park, St. Paul, three years ago on this date

The magic of changing leaves for a desert dweller cannot be overstated. 

Connected with hiraeth for me these days is a sense of surreal falling. A constant fall, not to be too metaphorical. I've been alternately beating myself up for "being bad at letting go and moving on" and working to reframe, in a more generous and kind, self-compassionate way, "being really good at valuing and honoring certain experiences I have had." There's a very sharp, bloody difference between those self-perceptions. It's a distinction I have been "working on" as we are fond of saying in America, for years. It has taken a lot of self acceptance to get to a place where I realize just how I am wired, and what comes naturally to me. In regard to sentiment, well, I am sentimental. I hold memories close. I am not a forgetter. I am not remade in each new experience. It's a dialectic where each new experience contains all of the other experiences. I get closer to being able to live when I accept this. And along with it, the realization that I live with my past. I do not move on. I live with. This is how I work. 

It does no good for me to feel hatred for myself around this attachment. It does no good for me to judge myself as a fucking clown fool sucker. It does no good for me to compare myself to the ability of others to forget and move on, and paint myself as a weak, foolish idiot by comparison. Think of any other struggle against acceptance that you can imagine and I have done it, and it does no good. It's more and more clear to me that what interferes with my ability to live is not how I am wired, but the ways in which I have hated how I am wired. Or even have allowed the judgments and perspectives of others to try to get me to change myself. The tension is not a natural result of being in love and having feelings and being immersed in memories. The tension is in trying to kill myself so that I look good for myself and others. Be strong. Not care. Get real. Move on. Forget it, Percy, it's Chinatown. 

There's a beauty and peace in surrender. In taking back the power of who I am. The people who have not been able to hang with who I am can go fuck themselves. The sign of same is when the response is to try to prune me, push me into a container, recommend "therapy," run away, avoid, ridicule, dismiss, or belittle. I can very easily go back and do an inventory now of all of the exchanges that I have had where the objective of another person was to kill me. That may sound extreme. It is not. Negate and erase who I am, is fancier language. Because let me tell you motherfucker, I am fucking inconvenient. I am not low maintenance. I have tried to be tough, strong, and low maintenance as a good, strong, normal man is supposed to be, and it is fucking stupid. For me anyway. 

It is also instructive to look back at all of the ways I have tried to do the same to others. How often I was incapable of simply radically validating women, in particular, but, instead, sought to diminish, prune, reduce, and shame them. I have become much better at holding space for others. A much kinder space has opened in me with much less judgment. It is not always operating, but it feels like, as I become more spacious and self-compassionate, there's much more room for others. 

Now it seems I am learning how to make space for my own stuff. It is astonishing how cruel and dismissive of myself I am capable of being. How much I rush and pressure myself. How much I hate myself. Again, it is not anyone else's choices, decisions, or behavior that threaten me, nor is it my natural responses. It is me, trying to kill me. Hating me. Hating my heart. Hating how I am. So now in this later stage of life where it feels there is not much time, and time goes very, very quickly, it feels like it's down to a duel to the death between me and me. 

Oh te dramas! But srsly. It goes back to the idea I have been musing over of a type of therapy for people who are all too well adjusted. I have been tentatively calling it "Disintegration Therapy." Being sane and functional in an exploitative, insane system is no virtue. Disintegration Therapy would seek to make clients completely dysfunctional, and proudly so. I guess there would have to be a waiver, and significant material support, and a lot of grant money. "Have you been Disintegrated?" would become the big question at parties. Would disintegrated people go to parties? Not sure. 

The simple promise in step 5 in the book Alcoholics Anonymous is that "we will no longer regret the past, nor wish to shut the door on it." This is love. 

A friend's Abramovic/Ulay tattoo

Rid of Me

 Glorious Polly Jean Harvey, 51 today. 

Herzlandschaft

 

Frikowskis, Fugazis, and Other Motherfuckahs

 In my Facebook "memories," sometimes a blessing, sometimes a curse, the following passage, widely attributed to Frida Kahlo, came up today:

The saga of this supposed Kahlo quotation is hilarious, given how earnestly and avidly it is recycled, and repeatedly attributed to her, and how aching and passionate the sentiment is. But it's fake Kahlo. It's very real Estafanía Mitre. Mitre, it turns out, is a young poet who wrote the above (or a version of it, originally in Spanish), and versions of it started appearing on Twitter around May 2014. I wonder how she feels about seeing her roughly translated piece go viral and get attributed to Kahlo. 

Here's one of the early posts, in Spanish, from the above article:

Mereces un amor que te quiera despeinada, con todo y las razones que te levantan de prisa, con todo y los demonios que no te dejan dormir. Mereces un amor que te haga sentir segura, que pueda comerse al mundo si camina de tu mano, que sienta que tus abrazos van perfectos con su piel. Mereces un amor que quiera bailar contigo, que visite el paraíso cada que mira tus ojos, y que no se aburra nunca de leer tus expresiones. Mereces un amor que te escuche cuando cantas, que te apoye en tus ridículos, que respete que eres libre, que te acompañe en tu vuelo, que no le asuste caer. Mereces un amor que se lleve las mentiras, que te traiga la ilusión, el café y la poesía.

— Estefanía Mitre (via soledadurbana)

The auto-translate from Bing Translator is kind of hilarious:

"You deserve a love that wants you to be toused, with everything and the reasons that lift you in a hurry, with everything and the demons that won't let you sleep. You deserve a love that makes you feel safe, that can be eaten in the world if you walk hand in hand, that feels that your hugs go perfect with your skin. You deserve a love that wants to dance with you, that visits paradise every time you look at your eyes, and that never gets bored of reading your expressions. You deserve a love that listens to you when you sing, that supports you in your ridiculous, that respects that you are free, that accompanies you on your flight, that does not frighten you to fall. You deserve a love that takes away lies, brings you illusion, coffee and poetry.

— Estefanía Mitre (via soledadurbana)"

Don't we all deserve a love that supports us in our ridiculous? Don't we want to be toused? A great big motherfuckin' love that can be eaten in the world if you walk hand in hand? Interestingly (whoa adverb boy), whoever translated Mitre's original into English substituted "hope" for "illusion," and how telling is that shit?

Anyway, I posted the quotation (with the Frida Kahlo attribution, and then was called on it by a FB friend, and edited to indicate the truth), and it led to a thought provoking exchange with a friend of mine. Their point of view, paraphrased, was basically "okay, that's great, but it's unrealistic, and maybe we need to lower our expectations." I appreciated hearing that, and I had included the following prelude to the quotation anyway:

"do you deserve this (the universal second person intended here, not *you* personally necessarily)? maybe you have created this with another. If you don't have this, is it because you don't deserve it? Don't want it? Or did you have it for five minutes, five months, five years, one second? Or have you not ever nor do you now have this because the universe is unjust and life is a dark comedy? Or is it because, if we got what we deserved, we'd be in serious trouble? Or if we got what we deserved, we'd take it for granted, and let fear and small mindedness ruin it? Or is it stupid in general to want anything at all from other human beings, who do not even know how to wipe their asses?"

That last question was a joke reflecting back on another Facebook post, regarding people who wipe their asses sitting on the toilet and people who wipe standing up, which, of course, led to an epic number of comments. This is the kind of thing Facebook is best at, really. Well, this and Rumi, and fugazi Frida. 

Anyway, my friend's realism verging on cynicism (there should be a word for that) got me thinking. Put me in touch with how hardened and bitter "a part" of me has been, "on and off," for almost two years now. Like the darker screeds of Bukowski, especially in his embittered, railing against capitalist nonsense and the way it hollows people out, mode. I mentioned as much to my friend and she said I was right, and I said I didn't want to be right. I want to be Frida, not Bukowski. She suggested maybe the truth is, we are all Frikowskis. This, I can maybe find a way to live with. 

like, part crow. part rainbow. All romantics meet the same fate someday anyway, so why not?

This small stretch of October days from 10/5 to 10/9 is the third solar return to one of the best, most unforgettable small stretches of days of my life, so I was already bouncing back and forth around all of this yesterday. I had already been remembering the marking of time, until I was reminded (yet again, by Facebook "memories," and a picture of freshly shined shoes at the Phoenix airport). Wisely or unwisely, this led me to a great many stunningly vivid and lovely memories, all tumbling out of a very few days, seemingly impossible that this series of experiences could have occurred in so short a time, and be so numinous and poignant and indelible. It was not a "bad" experience to plunge into vivid recollection, but it was deeply disorienting, and existentially bewildering, and achingly both sad and oddly edifying.  

The truth is, until some of these experiences, I had not known in blood and guts and bone what I had been missing. 

I recently had a dream where an old man who looked a lot like Jung was writing me a permission slip of some kind, which in itself is odd. He said, "I am only writing this out for you because you meant every word you said. If you had been lying, you would not get my note." When I woke up, I knew what he had meant. It's true. I did, in fact, mean every last word I said. That, in itself, may well be a first for me. As I have mentioned before, people are capable of literally saying goddamned anything at all, any time, for any or no reason. "Holding people to their word" is like trying to hold mercury in one's hands, and just as toxic. 

A fake Frida quotation, the idea that maybe "deserve" is an ill chosen word, the idea that maybe the way through is to be a Frikowski, and the idea that there's no quick or easy way to deal with memory itself. A tangle of a Wednesday morning. Experiencing something unfold in the present and discovering that it is *better* than romanticism, better than illusion, better than imagination, is astonishing enough. It leads one to the center of a labyrinth where, in spite of pragmatism, one begins to suspect that one actually deserves *more* than all of that. But one won't get it, or won't have it, or, at the very least, definitely will not keep it. 

It's a little bit like when I first went to Glacier National Park a couple summers ago. Just an analogy. But one sees photos, and thinks, wow. Or one gets told by people who have been there. "You have to go. It'll be beautiful." But what happened to me when I drove up there from the flatlands of Shelby, Montana, and actually experienced all of it, would not have been possible to predict. The Mitre piece is written by someone who has been there. At least, it seems that way. There's all different ways to stand in relation to it. But if you've been there, you know. 

Talk about being supported in your ridiculous. 

 

Burn in Water, Wash in Fire

 Burn in water; wash in fire.- Rosarium Philosophorum, 1550.

I have a couple of students who are avidly interested in alchemy, and I've supplied them with a lot of supplementary material, outside of our regular chemistry curriculum. There are a few areas of human endeavor that historically attracted the weirdest of the weird, and made them go basically mad, and alchemy is one of those arenas, at least in Europe. It may well have been due to mercury and lead poisoning, as well as the general consciousness twisting weirdness of the ironically named "philosopher's art." Anyway, the phrase quoted above of course has all sorts of metaphorical implications, but it is also literally true regarding, for example, alkali earth metals of group 1, which burn in water, and are "purified" by being burned. 

Like everything in all of the European literature of alchemy, actual chemical reactions are described in the most arcane and metaphorical language, a fact that Jung made much of, but that is not all that remarkable from an inductive, experiential perspective on working with matter. In fact, a great many propositions of quantum physics and cosmology seem like metaphors as well, a fact that many somewhat specious hybrid New Age/science writers make much of, at which, cosmic eyeroll. The simple fact is that matter is quite bizarre, and lends itself to all kinds of metaphorical conceptualization. 

A woodcut illustration of the "illuminatio," from Rosarium Philosophorum, 1550

Love burns in water and washes in fire. We have a bewildering experience of an alchemical encounter with a beloved, by which we are both burned and washed, but we don't understand exactly how we have changed in the chemical reaction, exactly what has been gained or lost, and we need some kind of framework or place to stand, to try to make sense of it. The heretical sin of the alchemists was in looking for God in matter, and the hierophantic moral rectitude of the Enlightenment was in either completely divorcing God from matter or (at least slyly) eradicating God altogether. The heretical sin of lovers throughout time is in choosing each other as the Divine, either against religious or social order, or both, and the punishment is metaphorically swift, and delivered by sword. 

Via The Marigold Tarot by Amrit Brar

After time, the baffling transformation and even more baffling evanescence is embedded simultaneously more deeply as a permanent wound one learns to live with, and all those hopes of "healing" or "transcendence" (let alone the more ridiculously superficial and idiotic "letting go and moving on") are just products of twitterpated infantile abnegating "functional" denial and bad faith "strength" or, even worse, "health." 

This is the way of the resigned alchemist, who was, for a brief time, tangled in mysteries, but has decided to "grow up," "do the responsible thing," and "get real." In this way, we betray ourselves to a deeper and more fatal degree than anyone else could ever betray us, and do ourselves the worst harm. Out of the flames of our most profound transformations we forge...tin. Ash. Regret. Simultaneously, we get the highest praise for our resignation. We have done the right thing. We are welcomed to the great, grey, bland General Nation of Anomic Acedia. Joni Mitchell was of course correct, all Romantics meet the same fate someday, cynical, drunk or sober, boring someone in some dark cafe, or on some boring blog. 

Go, go, go, said the bird: humankind cannot bear very much reality. (Burnt Norton, TS Eliot)

The Loud Corvids and Urban Wilds

 Sitting here at my desk, where, really, most of the week, I spend almost all of my waking hours now, and going through my morning rituals of the word game my sister and I play on Facebook, wishing FB friends a happy birthday, posting music history birthdays and iconic recordings done on this date, and posting a ton of memes and comments mostly harvested from past years on FB these days. As I am doing these things, savoring a cup of dark Major Dickinson's Blend courtesy Pete's Coffee, I find myself growing more and more irritated, and I have no conscious idea why. There's then this little irascible inner voice saying "shut the fucking fuck up, what the fuck, shut up, shut up, shut the fuck up" and it's then I realize there is a murder of crows out along the nearby trees and powerlines in the middle of some kind of incredibly vocal, incredibly loud, annoying crow war or crow counsel or something. 

I absolutely adore corvids, so, as soon as I snap to what has been irritating me, all is forgiven. I do wonder what it is they are vocalizing about. I don't know the significance of crow calls, or territories, or what a crow fight would be. I dug around on the internet for awhile and it turns out what I am probably hearing is a crow alarm call, which is usually in response to the presence of an avian or feline predator in the vicinity. Sometimes a murder of crows will mob a predator, like an owl or Cooper's hawk. in a show of territorial and tribal force. It was a little bit disorganized and not exactly a mob sound, which is usually an indication of a "background alarm," maybe even some kind of diffuse and untargeted anxiety. 

Maybe part of my misophonic reaction was also picking up on the anxiety, since there is a definite quality of alarm in these persistent caws and barks. Here's a charming video of a guy who is just wildly excited to witness a crow mob, chasing ospreys out of their territory. 

There's a lot of wildlife here in LA. So far, I've seen bobcats, foxes, skunks, possums, and coyotes. Sometimes they are completely mixed in to the urban landscape, other times (like the bobcats I saw), they are up in the mountains just outside of the city (where there are mountain lions and bear, also). Bobcats probably come down into the city as well. One interesting thing is that I have not seen any feral cats at all, in my neighborhood. I wonder what the story is of feral cats in LA in general, and in West LA in particular. Apparently there are at least 3 million feral cats in LA, so it's interesting to me that I haven't seen any at all in my neighborhood. They are either extremely skilled at remaining hidden or have been extirpated one way or another. Probably now that I have mentioned that I have never seen any, I'll start noticing them. 

I've also been working on a little flora of my immediate neighborhood. Nowhere near complete, as it seems plants from all over the world, and from dozens of biomes, are represented in people's yards. I asked my students an opening reflection question recently: What's your favorite plant or animal? One of my students surprised me by saying "Strelitzia." Talk about specific. Well, technically, generic. But yeah, I'm always noticing the Strelitzia species around here, and many are in full glorious bloom right now. There's even a couple of the giant Strelitzia nicolai with combination white and dark blue inflorescence. It turns out Strelitzia reginae is the "floral emblem" of Los Angeles. 

Inflorescence of Strelitzia nicolai. What's missing here is that the species is usually about 15 to 25 feet tall and looks like a giant banana tree. 

Strelitzia reginae, the floral emblem of Los Angeles

Be a Good Bayesian and Save the World

 "‘Bayesian epistemology’ became an epistemological movement in the 20th century, though its two main features can be traced back to the eponymous Reverend Thomas Bayes (c. 1701–61). Those two features are: (1) the introduction of a formal apparatus for inductive logic; (2) the introduction of a pragmatic self-defeat test (as illustrated by Dutch Book Arguments) for epistemic rationality as a way of extending the justification of the laws of deductive logic to include a justification for the laws of inductive logic. The formal apparatus itself has two main elements: the use of the laws of probability as coherence constraints on rational degrees of belief (or degrees of confidence) and the introduction of a rule of probabilistic inference, a rule or principle of conditionalization." (From The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy). 

Quantifying and formalizing inductive logic is of the utmost importance these days, since so many questions abound about the reliability of information and the very nature of what is actually happening in the world. Fascists and other types of authoritarian demagogues have long known that one of the fundamental precursors to controlling what people think is to discredit the very idea of information. One of the salutary ways to counter this general mistrust in all sources of information is to deploy a Bayesian framework of conditional likelihood, and remain open to new beliefs based on new evidence. I just published this Medium piece today that also recommends healthy use of Occam's Razor and Hanlon's Razor.  Truly, simplicity is best, and stupidity has much stronger priors than dastardly but complex cleverness. These are simply facts out of history. 

Anyway, the great insight of Reverend Bayes was that information changes our degree of confidence in the likelihood of an outcome. Standard probability gives odds as a ratio of a particular outcome to the total number of possible outcomes. Bayesian probability does this but assigns an different "weight" to the total number of possible outcomes based on prior information. An example would be choosing a student at random from a student population who is an art major. Standard probability would be to take the total number of art majors and divide by the total student population. But what if it's Tuesday, and Tuesday happens to be when only 20% of all of the art majors have a class on campus? Clearly, that makes it less likely that one would choose an art major at random. 

This trivial example points to the much more significant reality that, if we have pre-existing knowledge, we can often apply that knowledge to an estimate of the likelihood of a particular claim. When I first encountered Chump's tweet about being COVID positive, I think my level of belief was at about 30% confidence or perhaps lower. The Washington Post estimates that Chump has lied 25,000 times since being elected, so I'm justified in not accepting his tweet, really. It would be foolish to take it at face value, given my prior information. On the other hand, as more evidence came in from other sources, my confidence in the claim increased. I think this is a reasonable and healthy way to operate in the world. It would be weird for me to cling to my doubts and start developing some kind of elaborate conspiracy theory and widespread cover up idea, in the face of more reliable evidence. 

It seems that holding beliefs lightly, allowing for new, contradictory evidence, and re-evaluating one's confidence in one's beliefs are all skills that could save the world. They are also skills that could save a long term relationship, a marriage, a work situation, or any other area where we are deploying inductive logic and belief functions. Connected with a spirit of openness to new evidence, a willingness to sincerely investigate is very important. It's not enough for me to just wait passively for new evidence. Sometimes I have to go in search of it, especially when I recognize that I have a high level of confidence in a weird proposition. 

For example, maybe a coworker has not replied to a friendly email for days. I might start believing fairly confidently that said coworker hates me, or found the email stupid, or just does not want to reply. In such situations, it's important for me to be mindful and pursue more information. It's compassionate, it is reality therapy, and it is liberating for me to seek communication with this coworker and investigate my beliefs. The spirit of investigation makes a great many things possible that we shut doors on. 

I'm thinking of buying a stationary bicycle, for example, since the air quality is so bad here in LA that cardio really should be indoors, with filtered air. The thought first arose and then was immediately shot down, due to my imagination that stationary bikes are prohibitively expensive. It turns out they really are not, especially via a used equipment store. There's even a cool thing that includes a desk, so I could conceivably be doing cardio and grading or lesson planning. 

Anyway, it's Sunday. It's nap time. Life's weird. 

The Witch Favorites

 On the edge of October, I'm thinking about witches.

I knew a woman who came from a very dark, "Christian" cult background, and, after a while, she started to tell me what that was like. She came out of the deepest, actually craziest kind of Right Wing conglomeration you can imagine. Within this universe, propped up by "biblical teachings," women were essentially subjugated in every way, Handmaid's Tale style. Also, their sexuality was severely circumscribed, and they were blamed for "causing" sexual feelings in men. The basics are not extraordinary. In fact, the basics are just the way things are under the patriarchy. But the subsequent behaviors and beliefs might go a little deeper.

Her mother "caused" just such sexual feelings in a few different men in their "local church," a.k.a. cult, and they secretly got together and decided that, since they were all desiring her and fantasizing about her, well, obviously, she must be possessed by a demon, and she must be a witch. The other women in the cult were, of course, all too ready to support this theory as well. To her father's credit, although he initially joined with these men and women and agreed to a grueling, intimidating panel confrontation of her mother to try to determine how bad her possession was and to what degree she was actively practicing "sexual black magic," he then rejected the entire enterprise, called the men idiots and insane, and supported his wife.

Of course, they were ostracized from the cult, as a result, and got death threats, and threats of abduction and even rape, etc. You know, good Christian things. My friend was so terrified of all these goings on (she was just going through puberty, an only child), that she spent most of her time alone (she was home schooled, of course), in an attic, hiding out, not eating, and reading books. Of course, the local "Christian" community started to think maybe *she* was the "real witch" in the family and the source of the trouble. So a round of harassment and gossip and intimidation followed her through her early years of puberty. There was even a young man who agreed to be a "spy" and try to woo her and see if he developed "sinful desires" as a result of being near her. She thought he was just a kind, book-loving kid, but it turned out that he did develop "sinful desires" toward her, and he outed her to the "Christian" community as definitely a witch, and it broke her heart.

This is America, in the 1980's. Not Salem, in the late 17th Century.

So this story contributes to my desire to smash the patriarchy, and is illustrative of why I am sickened by patriarchal "Christianity." This was a very intelligent, gentle, talented, beautiful person, raised in a thoroughly spiritually abusive rape culture environment, and she struggled with crushing shame, depression, suicidality, PTSD, night terrors, etc., into her adult life. So I saw up close the terrible damage this culture can do. And for a long time, it was easy to compartmentalize it as, well, that's Texas, and that's the way cults work. But it has gradually become apparent to me that, as I said above, the basics in the patriarchy are the same everywhere.

I recently had this vision of all of the weird and weirdling women throughout history, shy, quiet, withdrawn and "strange," or bold, rebellious, vibrant and fiercely alive, either way inscrutable to cowardly men and co-opted women, suddenly identified, suddenly singled out, and then caught, ensnared, and, one way or the other, imprisoned, isolated, tortured and murdered. Most of the women I've been with could easily have been scapegoated in this way. All the qualities that I most value in women are pretty much the ones that the patriarchy wants to burn at the stake. Is it any wonder that the resulting desire to dismantle the patriarchy is so strong, even in people who can't quite figure out what it is that is the problem or what needs dismantling? And why the "good guy" myth is part of what has to go, since it's often the "good guy" who turns witch-burner?

Anyway, look around, get to know your witches, and either love them or get out of their way. This is a great time of year to support your local witches.

A Brief Ramble Regarding my Internet History

I had the sudden urge tonight to remind all of my Facebook friends that...this...as in, this timeline, is me, stone cold sober. I cannot tell you how grateful I am that my trip through social media in a broader sense didn't begin until I was about 3 years sober. I think a lot of my Facebook friends are often on there in various stages of intoxication and it's charming. But I am glad to be posting sober, let me tell you. 

I was involved with strange, early forms of social interaction on the internet, from about 1994 to 2004, prior to getting sober, including very early Usenet bulletin boards, email lists, online forums, AIM, ICQ, and then the weird AOL feature of "chat rooms," one of which, called "Orgy," I was a regular member of for about 8 years (it had exactly zero to do with sex, although guys would sometimes wander in looking to "cyber," and promptly get trolled and flamed). "Orgy" was a hilarious room full of sarcastic, well read, funny people and most of the time we made stupid jokes, talked about books, and made fun of political figures. 

It used to be possible to see who was on AOL near where one lived, and I picked up several women this way, and that was a weird manifestation of "singles" bars online, although most of the women I met that way were married. There was the phrase, "internet single," and that was good enough for many. I think this culture has maybe receded somewhat, although I'm not sure. I haven't met anyone that way in about 18 years or so. I think it's good that Facebook does not just provide a list of people in one's neighborhood or area or whatever who are logged on. 

On AOL, you could find women on the list of "people near you," *go to where they were on AOL*, and start chatting them up. I've always been good at internet small talk, even though I am really pretty bad at it in person. And then, wow, what a coincidence, I'm from Santa Fe too! And these "connections" often led to "dates," which were really just hookups. I had one-off (no pun intended) sexual encounters with four women I met that way within a short period of time, and had friendships with two others where the sexual chemistry wasn't happening, but we remained friends for years. I've since lost touch with all of those women. In weird existential greyness, I don't recall their names. In my sex and relationship inventories in recovery work, I have had to use letters as place holders. Other people I met at first in the online universe, I am still friends with to this day, and we have even met in person, in some cases. 

I never did get much into MySpace since it really rose up from about 2005 on, when I was struggling in early sobriety and actually trying to reduce my online time. For a brief but obsessive time, from about 1998 to 2000, I was addicted to Diablo (the first one) and had many "friends" on Battlenet, where my oldest brother and I would play Diablo long into the wee hours of the morning, which was much worse for him, since he lived in New Jersey. We were both members of a clan, The Snakegod Clan. My most developed character was a level 40 mage named Dark Magus, in honor of the Miles Davis record.

Dark Magus had the highest level spells it was possible to have in the first Diablo and was dangerous enough that he often inadvertently killed team members. This gives you some idea of how completely obsessed I was with the first Diablo. My brother in NJ, me in NM, and two other players from Hawaii would descend into Hell/Hell in teams of four players and run the entire most difficult level in under an hour, handily dispensing with Snow Witches and Balrogs or whatever and Diablo himself, and do this maybe 5 or 6 times a night, in search of extremely rare, extremely powerful magical items. Such utter geek nonsense. While doing so, we would chat about our marriages, jobs, general life issues, health, and finances. Very odd. I wonder where those Snakegod clan members are now. But this is just another example of how I have had entirely virtual, digital, sometimes close friendships with a great many people over the years, and I have never met them "in real life." 

I also was (very unwisely) playing online poker, with real money, drunk, for several years before I got sober. That was a bad thing to be doing. I did meet the author of Zen and the Art of Poker, and he and I were internet friends for many years, but have since lost touch. But online poker for real money was of course full of hackers and cheaters, and I kept getting outdrawn and outgunned in extremely unlikely ways because they were teaming up on tables and back-channeling their hole cards, etc., and it was a time wasting and money wasting proposition. 

It's odd to reflect on the fact that I have been intensely involved, wrapped up in all sorts of foolish virtual shenanigans, and very interested in the internet for 26 years now, and on Facebook for 13 years. It's weird to realize that Facebook is basically a fancy, gussied up, extremely more dastardly evil Big Brother version of some of these early forms of internet culture. MeWe is interesting because it feels a lot more 1990's in its interface, very old school and clunky and simple. But it is just dead as a doornail over there, because everyone obviously prefers being psychologically manipulated and fucked with on FB. It's more fun somehow, being rolled repeatedly by the goddamned algorithms. 

Anyway, when I think of the history of my involvement with the internet on a social level, and how important many of my virtual relationships have been, it is a powerful reminder of the weirdness of this arena. How real, heartfelt, and true, a great many of my connections have been, where there has been not even one real life meeting. I do not know if this is true for people in general, regarding their virtual relationships, but for me, for whatever reason, many have been just as powerful and present as my meatspace connections, and a few have been even more so. I wonder if anyone is doing research on this form and intensity of connection.