I forgot to eat enough food today and now I have a killer of a headache with a backend of throw-up. So please bare that in mind as you read this.
Thanks to everybody who commented on my Cassidy Campbell piece yesterday. I’m glad a lot of you liked it. A couple of people said that I was being paternalistic, and one thought it might be hypocritical to write an article about my feelings regarding the heat of a spotlight I’m only adding to.
I lend more credence to the charge of hypocrisy than to the one of paternalism. I know it’s a dirty word, but I’d warrant that anybody of child-rearing age who doesn’t feel paternalistic towards the crying homecoming queen perhaps has other issues at hand. Of course, feeling paternalistic and being it are two entirely different animals. I’ve re-read it, and at no point did I intone that Cassidy herself should take any action on my account, nor on the account of anyone except herself. In fact, I believe I said that her life and aspirations are “none of any of our business.”
As for the hypocrisy, I worried about this one, and very nearly scrapped the whole post because I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I could bring to the conversation. But the idea of adding a positive voice to the rabble tipped the scales in my favor, even as it probably tipped them away from general decency. Such is the spread with most things where I’m involved.
I wish that there had been more actual conversation regarding what we as regular people could do, but it’s hardly decent to expect you guys to have answers I certainly can’t come up with. Sometimes I feel like I’m an unwilling slave to the five day a week schedule I’ve put myself to. Other times I feel that this is the only way for someone like me. Someone who will hide work rather than show it, someone who will err on the side of stoicism when it comes to anything important. I’ll talk your ear off about a million trivial things, but when it comes to anything really close to my heart, you won’t hear about it. And my past isn’t close to my heart, it’s just an accounting of events.
Sometimes I get to writing something really real almost by accident, and then I have to push it out because this blog goes up 5 days a week, no matter what the fuck else is going on. I’m dizzy right now, my fucking head hurts so much, and this isn’t the first time I’ve written like this. It won’t be the last. If you’ve noticed I tend to have a weird inverse relationship between the deterioration of my physical aspect and the level at which I write. This is actually how I write when I’m too assed up to regulate tone or pitch. Half of this thing reads like a parody of an 19th century instruction manual and the other half like a convict’s love letters. I blame all the Victorian YA books I read as a child. Eat dicks C.S. Lewis.
In any case. I did wonder if I should write about Cassidy Campbell, and what I can say about that is I decided to, and I’m glad I did. Is it the perfect commentary on trans youth in the media cycle? By no means whatsoever. But I said what I meant to say, I laid out my personal concerns, and I kept to my fucking schedule, which everybody who’s ever worked can tell you is the most important skill an aspiring anything can have. On the list of shit artists care about, scheduling is too far down by miles.
And just so your time on my blog wasn’t wasted today, I found this for you: