Posted on by d

No us, no them.

I work for a company with people who live all around the world, including Israel and Palestine.

Just as not all Americans are bad people who love guns and think a “god” gave them this land to take as they see fit, not all Israelis feel that way either, and not all Palestinians hate Israelis. The Israeli military is not all Israelis, despite the fact that everyone is forced to serve. Zionists are not all Israelis. Hamas is not all Palestinians. The news never tells us everything.

I did not choose to be born in a place my ancestors stole, but I am here, and if you know anything about me, you know that I really give a shit about that. A lot of Israelis feel the same way about where they were born, too. They deeply love and respect the land where they live and are intimately connected to it, and they also understand that they share it with other people (obviously this is the abbreviated version, and there are different understandings about how and why everyone is there). Regardless, like many Americans, they don’t have or desire anywhere else to “go,” either, so instead, they work for peace and mutual respect and the end of an occupation mentality. And there are many Palestinians who do the same. They work from opposite ends of experience, but they meet in the middle and try to understand it all.

Many years ago, I traveled there, and I stayed in Jerusalem for a while, an epicenter of Abrahamic religious tension – the three biggest patriarchal religions all claiming to own rights to some ancient bricks, requiring that anyone desiring of the religious experience of touching them walk through metal detectors first.

Just like we have here in the US, there are a certain type of people who feed into this tension, and who believe in the might of military and weaponry to oversee it. It’s not everyone, though. Later during those travels, I stayed with an Israeli family. During a religious observance when all the electricity was shut off throughout the town, I snuck out with the family’s teenagers so they could go meet their Palestinian friends and hang out under the cover of darkness. And they were teenagers, smoking cigarettes, laughing, making eyes at each other, speaking each other’s languages and enjoying the excitement of illicit activity.

I can’t see another “free Palestine” post today. Stop it. I believe in the freedom of Palestine, too. I don’t, at all, approve of these settler rampages that destroy Palestinian homes, olive groves and businesses, believing in their god-given redneck right to steal the land. I do not approve of the Israeli army killing people (especially backed with weaponry provided by the United States). And I do not approve of Hamas taking people hostage, raping or killing people, either. A land of generationally traumatized people is at war with itself, breeding atrocities. There is no end to this. No one wins.

If there is a god, and if that god is why we are, in all of these patriarchal religions, the sole species blessed with the gift of reason, we are not at all serving this god by acting like this. “They” are every bit as much of us as we are “them.” We are all human, and we are the worst kind of animal; we have been caged by our own rage and fear and are now terrified, without trust, faith, or the ability to truly use the gifts this god as purportedly bestowed upon us.

Pray for Palestine. Pray for Israel. Pray for humanity. Or in lieu of all that, just be a good human. Work for peace and the evolution of this species, because if we aren’t already there, we are on our way to hell.

*** Feature image by hosny salah from Pixabay

Posted on by d

A love story

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

I asked ChatGPT to tell me this story.

This is not going to become a blog of AI-generated writing, although from time to time I may post some of my results for entertainment or conversational purposes. A writer recently called AI a “harbinger of dystopia,” and could be that, indeed, but I am thinking about the ways in which artists and writers can harness instead of fear it. We are definitely on the precipice of a revolution and have the tools to prepare ourselves for an unknown future, or at the very least, to aim ourselves toward adaptability.

But for now, romance as portrayed by artificial intelligence:

A Love Story Between Two Androgynous Beings

In a world far beyond our own, there lived two androgynous beings named Ash and Indigo. They were different from the other creatures in their world, with no clear gender or physical distinctions.

Ash and Indigo first met in a vast and beautiful garden, surrounded by exotic flowers and lush greenery. They were both drawn to each other’s unique energy and spent hours talking and sharing their thoughts and dreams.

As time passed, their connection deepened and they began to see each other in a new light. They were both unsure of what this meant, as they had never experienced anything like it before.

One evening, as they were sitting under a towering oak tree, Ash took Indigo’s hand and confessed their feelings. Indigo was surprised but felt the same way, and they shared a tender kiss under the starry sky.

From that moment on, Ash and Indigo’s love grew stronger every day. They would spend hours exploring the vast world around them, discovering new sights and sounds together.

Their love was pure and unconditional, and they didn’t care about the opinions of others who couldn’t understand their relationship. They were happy together, and that was all that mattered.

As they grew older, their love only deepened, and they became inseparable. They would often sit under that same oak tree, reminiscing about the past and dreaming about the future.

In the end, Ash and Indigo’s love stood the test of time, proving that true love knows no bounds, no gender, and no limits. They lived a long and happy life together, surrounded by the beauty of their world, and their love story became the stuff of legends.

Posted on by d

On letting go of extraordinary ambition

The feeling of it is indescribable.

In a place like the one where I am now, it’s very easy to get caught up in the dreams of others, tossed into a pot of brilliance as we all are.

I remembered though, recently, that my walk is my own; I don’t have an entire life ahead of me anymore, just half of one, probably. My life already reads as a list of grand adventures and minor accomplishments, and I have little desire to let go of some of the things I had before immersing myself in academia: a garden, a wildness, time to create and enough of an income to provide for my daughter and pay for a pleasurable life lived within our means.

I’d felt isolated, but now I know why. The separation was only painful because I was unwilling to accept the truth: I am different, I am in a different place in my life, I believe that knowledge is power, I’m already good at what I do and being able to study and network with top-notch professionals is an icing on the cake. And I know exactly where the few people I can count on here are. This is literally all that matters right now.

I came here with much more noble ideas. I am finishing my stay with the realization that I am at a zenith. It’s time to reflect.

It’s a story that was told to me many years ago, but I only chose to remember half of it. I would eventually come to this place. I would eventually have things to accept. I would have to come to terms with what I’ve always known: regardless of how loudly I shout, I’m more effective when people don’t know who it is that’s yelling.

I will relax into doing something for sheer joy, with the knowledge that my choice to do so is a radical act in and of itself. It doesn’t require age to earn the privilege of pleasure or creative expression. Anyone who’s been doing the hard work of trying to make the world a better place deserves to settle into the goodness of a present, and we deserve to have the time to create that space if it’s not already there.

I don’t need to be a hero, I just need to live, to show my daughter how it’s done, to make sure she and others have the space they need to be joy.

Posted on by d

These eyes.

A riot of color welcomed me, and a quiet cacophony of hummingbirds and bees, butterflies, other little things come to get drunk on flower sperm and help keep the vibe alive. I was there to see it for her, to relieve some of the pressure of maintaining a garden, of dealing with glaucoma, of not being able to see the finer details anymore. 

She was something of a hedge witch though. She knew where she’d planted things, could still see when the deer had helped themselves to the boneset, knew when it was time to prune so plants had more energy to regenerate. She had me wage war on the anemones, the beautiful white flowers that built networks just under the surface of the soil and spread like a California wildfire. This war, this endless war, had me returning each week to listen to the sounds of the wind in the poplars, to uncover beetle nests with delight, to run to her like a child because I’d found the first monarch caterpillar of the season and it was eating something other than milkweed.

What was this plant, I wondered? She held it close and then far, then sniffed at it, closing the worse of her two eyes in hopes of catching a clearer glimpse.

“I don’t know. I don’t know.” 

I was on the clock, so sharing wonder was as far as I could digress. I’d left my phone in the car, the one with the plant ID app. She would have been a bit disgusted, I think, had I consulted it first, a bit angry with everything, the kids these days, kids being relative since there I stood at nearly fifty, wide-eyed with wonder at a caterpillar, holding it out to my 74-year-old friend.

I was still young, to her. Though mine, too, were beginning their decline, I could still be her eyes, so I needed to be good at it. I pinched a sprig and put it between the pages of a book, the book I’m reading, the book I can read. I would look it up later, come up with a way to tell her how I found my way to its name. 

She was already losing so much magick, so much magick. I hoped that after I left, she sat and looked at the shapes I’d created as I cleaned up the beds and gave the plants room to breathe. I hoped that she sat there and listened to the music—the wind in the poplars, all the sweet pollinators who’d come to her oasis, the offering her garden gave her in exchange for the love she gave it, for the love that I, through proxy, now continued.

Posted on by d

whatever happened to tomwhore

I found him again today, in 1997 talking about an original online community and that was in the early nineties. I was twenty-one and working at my first job in New York in a tall skyscraper. There was a lot of shift happening; the boss who helped pay for my move to New York ended up not even coming, but he kindly found me a job in another department. It was supposed to be some sort of technology department but the dinosaur who ran it wouldn’t know the internet if he’d lived to see it and I had little to do, so I spent most of my days on usenet.

eventually that company got bought by a bigger company and they dissolved our department but the ole dinosaur god bless him got me a job in yet another department; it wasn’t permanent, but it was a paycheck for a bit more of my future. this time i wound up in a server room with tomwhore.

there were others, too, i think, but the only ones i remember are the boss and tomwhore, and only tomwhore by name. the boss guy had terrible eighties hair and chain smoked and was always angry and since i was in the server room now i stopped covering my tiny little nose stud and tried to start normalizing it in the corporate world. people were just starting to get desktop computers in their cubicles. lynx was a mysterious new world.

jobs were kind of getting fluid at this company and tomwhore tried to advocate for me to get a permanent job but the boss, who was a Cypriot and was constantly on the phone with his brother (who was in Cyprus) did not want to hire me because of my nose piercing. So he just kept stealing computers from the company and sending them to Cyprus.