APRIL 25 2022

My mind has become a sewer as of late. I think I’ve gravitated to daily news, doom scrolling and idiotic Reddit posts to distract myself from my existential torment and deeper emotions. I feel like I'm in a bit of an inter-zone between being nonfunctional and deeply depressed to slowly peeling myself out from my winter moulting chamber and being able to deal with life again.

I’m a little bit embarrassed of my prolific over-sharing on the Neocities feed – I didn’t realize that all of the comments I was posting went to a larger public feed as well. I thought they were only visible to people who followed me.

I am thankful to have had a place to get things off my chest that I can’t share with too many others in my life. My mental health struggles have been going on and on and on for like 13 years – and I don’t want to keep burdening everyone around me.

I’ve since taken down most of the really personal stuff and am going back to alchemizing my sorrows into poetry and art rather than indiscriminately bombing my wall. And I’ll be barfing out my brain sludge into this newly created blog space.

I think there’s a big part of me that’s been treating my mental health like a conquest rather than just accepting myself as a vulnerable and slightly broken person. In many ways it would be comforting to go back to being my bad ass punk / metal self and hide behind a sub-cultural persona again, but that’s not how life works. I’m meant to keep mutating and learning how to hold my sensitivities and be real with the world. I’ve spent so much of my life trying to adapt to my surroundings and figure out how to get along, and now I’m realizing that I’m a just an atypical person (most likely neurodivergent) and that’s okay. And now that I’m no longer wasting my time trying to be cool in various social scenes, I have real friends who are solid.

I’m generally trying to be more open-minded these days and to try and understand where people are coming from and work through conflicts in healthy ways – aaaaaaand then there’s this other fiery side to myself that bursts out like a Rob Botin werewolf. I guess that’s why I’m not a politician and am instead on the frontlines telling cops to go fuck themselves. Yet on a deeper level, I want to be able to relate to the challenging people that come into my life and try and understand say the process of being brainwashed by totalitarian governments or organized religion or how young men can become so upset with their inability to attract women* that they would turn to mass shootings and brutal misogyny.

I’ve come to realize that although there were many things about my childhood that were quite challenging, one thing I was blessed with was an incredible amount of freedom. My parents never forced any sort of dogma onto me, and so I don’t know what it’s like to have some kind of baked in religious, cultural or political indoctrination that’s almost like a possession.

And in trying to wrap my head around the whole incel thing - I really do understand social awkwardness. During my own coming of age I watched most of my girlfriends hooking up with guys and having all kinds of wild sexual experiences, yet I remained a painfully shy weirdo who fashioned myself after Nik Fiend and still watched cartoons. It wasn’t until after high school age and falling in love that I ended up doing the wild thing. And sadly, I compromised myself somewhat because I felt like a loser. I bleached my hair blonde, started wearing skirts and fish nets stockings and grew my eyebrows back in... and it worked: a few months later I was hooked up.

Though I suppose I didn’t compromise myself all that much as I still had a goth hawk and was wearing a full face of vampire make-up with blue lips when I met my first boyfriend, but I was definitely dressing more “slutty” and less androgynous than I had years prior.

I’ve always had a lot of guy friends and over the past few years I’ve made friends with some younger men who have opened up to me about still being virgins. They carried a lot of shame about it and I can understand that, as I know that society puts a huge amount of pressure on people to “get laid”, especially men, who are often praised for their sexual exploits. And I imagine it’s really difficult for men who don’t fit into the mainstream model of masculinity.

I can say from my own personal experiences of often hooking up with others just for some kind of status thing, that so much of the sex I've had in my life hasn’t been very good at all. And I’ve heard many others say the same thing. It’s surprising to me the number of women who have told me that they rarely or never have orgasms. Or men who have told me that they were pressured into sex as if they’re non-stop fuck machines without feelings. And most pornography isn’t very good at all - it’s not how real sex happens.

There’s this beautiful thing that’s possible between two humans when they actually love and respect each other and it doesn't matter how self-conscious you are or if you have backne or butt breath - it just works and it’s fucking awesome. It doesn't happen very often but I reckon it’s worth the wait.

And two of the young men who opened up to me about their extended virginity are both with partners now. One is married and the other is engaged. It didn’t happen until they were in their early 30’s. Maybe why things worked out for them is that rather than becoming bitter woman haters and magnifying their self-loathing into a vacuum chamber with groups of other alienated young men, they instead stayed vulnerable and worked through their feelings and were open to having friendships with women of all ages. And they both married women who had similar interests as them, who were also shy and introverted and didn’t like hanging out in big groups.

Some thoughts for the incels: perhaps rather then descending into a vortex of self-pity and shitty pornography that will destroy your perception of human sexuality, you could instead rise above all of the mainstream bullshit and humanize women? I know, it sounds crazy, but why not seek out women who are nerdy and sensitive like you are nerdy and sensitive, and then become friends with them, like just get to know them? When you start treating women as equal yet different, sensitive sentient beings and hanging out with them casually then you will meet more women and attract more women and one day you might meet someone who you will fall in love with and have real sex with.

A really common theme among male friends of mine who have lamented over their inability to find a partner is that they really want to be with a socially outgoing physically fit woman that fits some kind of media generated ideal of what a woman should look like. Or worse, a woman who is reminiscent of those whom they masturbate to whilst watching pornography. Yet most of these men are introverted, shy, not physically fit and have substance abuse issues. They rarely seem to reflect on how much they could be doing to improve their own lives and becoming more happy and healthy within themselves. Women become a convenient scapegoat.

Sure there are plenty of horrible women out there in the world who do horrible things, but it’s not because they're women - it’s because they’re human. Men, women and others are equally capable of being super shitty and hurtful and lame. Because humans are kinda messed up, in case you haven’t noticed. But if your response to feeling rejected and not fitting in and not being able to attract a romantic partner is to become angry, violent and hateful, then you are now part of the problem. If you know how much it hurts to be rejected and abused then you have a responsibility to break the mold and treat people better. We’re at a tipping point where cycles of abuse need to be broken and we need to grow the fuck up.

Anyway, it’s your life, but just some tips for those on here that think it’s cool to write extended stories about women being violently raped or make statements like “all women are whores”. Or to those who are more offended by me speaking out against violent misogynistic content, than the violent misogynistic content itself. Like I need another reason to hate humanity in general.. thanks ya’ll!

And then there’s the Pro-Russian troll (s) – pretty sure is mostly one person with multiple accounts who also happens to be an incel, who also happens to be one of the few people who were reading my website since I started posting on here regularly and who seemed sincerely interested in my writing....... which is strange to me. Yet a part of me wishes I could have explored that connection more when we were on better terms and tried to find some understanding between each other, as I do feel an intellectual and emotional kinship with that person and he hugely inspired my life for the better through his revolutionary writings about autism. I often find it hard to grasp all of the complex layers of humans and the confusing and contradictory nature of human nature.

In principle, I believe in freedom of expression, and in the 90’s when I was growing up there were a lot of extreme counter-cultural expressions that probably wouldn't be acceptable these days. And I’m a hypocrite because I wasn’t politically correct at all growing up and explored a lot of extreme music and films. And throughout my life I’ve explored many extreme sub-cultures and have been in the middle of a lot of intense scene dynamics. I was also racist and ignorant myself when I first came to Vancouver as a young teenager. And I’ll be working through layers of ignorance that I carry as a colonial European on lands acquired through genocide for my entire life.

As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to see how simply tolerating hatred or being apathetic to it while it’s in your midst is in itself a kind of quiet condonement, and there is great power in that – often to the detriment of humanity as a whole. I’m now willing to stand up and speak out when I see racism happening around me. Like for instance on the 14 Hastings bus in Vancouver, which I’ve taken a lot over the years, there are often altercations between people and racial slurs getting hurled. In the past I wouldn’t have spoken up and intervened, though now I do.

I really don’t know what is the best way is to hold people accountable for harmful behaviour or the promotion of harmful acts or endangerment of others through misinformation? Should hate groups and racist people be allowed to propagate information under the banner of free speech? Even if the information being spread leads to the freedoms of others being limited or outright genocide? Isn’t it a good idea to cancel people like Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein? Yet how do we protect innocent men from being falsely accused and having their lives destroyed (as is generally the case if someone get accused of child sexual abuse – even if it comes out later to be untrue)? If angry and alienated people like incels and so-called “Freedom Fighters” get pushed further into the margins, will they just be driven to greater acts of destruction? Is there some way to allow people to express themselves honestly without being judged yet also push them to grow spiritually and emotionally? I don’t know! It seems like humanity grows in very messy and painful ways and I worry that in the coming years people will be suffering greatly as they're forced to come to terms with the social, political and ecological realities that we’re living in and how we’re literally destroying ourselves.



(*When I say “women” I’m referring to gender not assigned sex and by this definition trans, non-binary and two-spirited people are also included. From what I've gathered about the incel movement, the violent aspects are generally expressed by young men who are mostly heterosexual and who are mostly angry at women, so I’m using those terms here. At other times when I’m talking about relationships I try to be more gender neutral so everyone feels included.)