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Guest: Sumiko Saulson
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Sumiko Saulson is a Bram Stoker Award® Finalist for Poetry for The Rat King (2022, Dooky Zines) and Melancholia (2024, Bludgeoned Girls Press). Elgin Award Nominee (2022). 2018 Afrosurrealist Writers Award, and 2021 Ladies of Horror Readers Choice Award winner. Their novel Somnalia: The Metamorphoses of Flynn Keahi is available on Mocha Memoirs Press.
This week, we talk scary movies, church v state, aliens, magical thinking, and whether neo-pronouns are as new as they say. Also demons, The Rat King, and movies that made us realize we were bi.
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Transcript
Introduction to The Mentally Oddcast
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You are listening to The Mentally Oddcast, where we talk with creatives about neurodivergence, trauma, addiction, and all the other things that impact and inform our art. Our goal is to show everyone that no matter what you're going through, you are not alone and you can make art about it.
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Music
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You are listening to the
Guest Introduction: Sumiko Salson
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Mentally Oddcast. My name is Wednesday, leave Friday, and we are brought to you by Sometimes Hilarious Horror. This week, we are speaking with Sumiko Salson, and I have really been looking forward to this.
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um Now, um they are an award-winning author of ah okay, this is a word I was not familiar with, Afro-surrealist and multicultural sci-fi and horror. So we're going to get into that a little bit.
Discussing Sumiko's Novels
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Their latest novel is Happiness and Other Diseases, and it is available from Mocha Memoirs Press. There's a bunch of credits here because, oh my god, they have done so much stuff.
00:01:14
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HWA scholarships and awards, ah Bram Stoker finalists. We're going have all this stuff in the description so you can look at their illustrious career. Samiko. Thanks so much for being here.
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Now, hey, how you doing? You know what? The sequel to Happiness and Other Diseases, um Somnalia, the metamorphosis of Flynn K, he is actually out now in Mocha Memoirs Press.
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Oh, wow. Has it been that long since before you told me this info and we actually sat down to record? My goodness. Yeah, I mean, it's been out for about a year now. Oh, wow. Okay. Cool.
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Okay.
Childhood Influence of Horror Movies
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Cool. Well, all right. um We generally start by asking guests to tell us the story of the first horror movie that they remember seeing, and I would love to hear yours.
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um So, yeah, my parents took us to see horror movies when we were really, really, really little, um and I remember ah being um probably about five years old And, um, you know, it was the seventies. So drive-ins were big. So we were at the drive-in theater and me and my little brother were playing on the swings and stuff at the playground. Cause they have a playground at the drive-in.
00:02:36
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um, I look up and, uh, this person's giving birth to this baby that jumps out with these really sharp teeth and starts, um, tearing up on the doctor's neck so it was this movie called I think it was called It's Alive or something like that okay actually I wasn't sure if you were going to say Basket Case because those are like the films from that era where that kind of thing goes down yeah I think Basket Case maybe was older because was like 1974 okay so we're about the same then yeah
00:03:11
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of four okay so we're about the same age that and yeah um I'm 57. okay. Yeah, I'm 54. Yeah.
00:03:22
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So I'm i a little older than you. So yeah, It's Alive came out in 74. And I think Basket Case maybe, yeah, it was a definitely a similar theme to It's Alive.
00:03:39
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um But yeah, that's the first one that I remember. um seeing and like yeah basket case came out in like 82 so yeah that's that was the the new one for a younger generation um and but yeah that's the first one i remember seeing um it's not the first movie that i remember scaring me though um because the first movie that really scared me was planet in the apes um because ah I was at home watching that and we got to the end part where the statue of Liberty is there. They realize that it's actually earth.
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And for some reason, this created a terror of an extinction level, uh, event, you know, humanity experiencing extinction.
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Yeah. Happened. Yeah, I realized I would have been six in 1974, so I think I must have been six when I watched It's Alive. And I think I was maybe about a year younger than that when we saw Planet of the Apes on TV. It was really scary.
00:04:54
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Wow. Yeah. Now, it's interesting because um I also had parents that let me watch most horror movies. I think Faces of Death was the first thing that they said, no, you shouldn't watch this because it's real.
Should Kids Watch Horror Movies?
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I'm like, oh, yeah wow. And then, you know, turned out to not be so real. But what what are your thoughts on that about parents that let their kids watch horror really, really young? Do you think that that's an okay idea or something maybe we should get away from?
00:05:24
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I mean, first of all, I don't have children and I really am. Me neither. That's why I love to discuss it. Yeah. I'm loathe to tell other people how to parent their children. Um, in the seventies, it was normal for people to actually, you know, do something like that. And when they started first started having rated movies, um, but well, I mean, no, they probably had rated movies way back then, but when we first started going to like, um,
00:05:54
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not drive-ins, but like, um, you know, um, movie theaters. Um, I remember that in the seventies, my mom could go up to the theater with me and buy the ticket and send me in there and didn't have to sit in the movie.
00:06:14
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Um, so the attitudes have changed and now, um, they do make it so that ah parents have to accompany children into the movie theater. um But they still are not actually saying that you can't have your kid in the theater.
00:06:29
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They're saying that you have to accompany the child. So right um they're making it so that the parent is responsible for explaining to the child what's going on in the movie. um So it becomes the parent's responsibility.
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um I do think that, um you know,
00:06:51
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it's sort of a first world problem, honestly. um Yeah, because, you know, um
00:07:02
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when, you know, let me put it this way. We live in a place where a lot of people's children are pretty sheltered.
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um Not all people's children are sheltered in certainly um even within my own family. um I'm a biracial person who's African-American ah and Ashkenazi Jewish.
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And for me as an African-American, um there have been um deaths by gun violence and a lot of really bad things that have happened to people that were directly related to me.
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um So I think that The idea that people are going to become traumatized by the content that they watch is um maybe also, you know, based on the idea that we can protect children from um scary things.
00:08:08
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And that's based on the idea that we're going to be able to protect them. I mean, a lot of kids are dealing with things that are really horrible in their regular life and not just movies.
00:08:20
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I think it's up to the parents if they want to take their kids to a scary movie, honestly. I don't think that kids are going to...
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I mean, there's certain things I probably wouldn't take a little kid to see, but I don't think that a kid's necessarily going to be traumatized for life by a scary movie. I think that, um like, my cousin, who's about...
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who was born when I was 12, she's like 12 years older than 12 years younger than me. We took her to see like Friday the 13th. And she just looked at it and she looked at us and she said, this is fake. This isn't real. thislar She knew it wasn't real. was a really smart kid.
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um That said, ah people don't have to take their kids to scary movies. People can opt out of it. People can protect them their kids from that. I have people that are raising their their children not to be on screens.
00:09:24
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Oh, wow. So they don't have televisions in their home, and they have people turn their cell phones upside down and not look at their cell phones anywhere near the kids because they don't want the kids exposed to screens, right?
00:09:38
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Wow. That's a choice that the parents can make. And I think it's always been that way too. I think that there were hippie parents when um I was growing up who didn't want their kids to watch TV. So I think that these are kind of like individual choices for parents to make based on their personal value system.
00:10:00
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And I don't believe that um I personally want to police parents' choices about things like that. don't. ah was an advanced reader, I was also reading at a really young age.
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And so by the time I was in fifth grade, I was reading horror novels as well. We read a lot of V.C. Andrews at that age, and then you know Stephen King, obviously. But V.C. Andrews, not horror per se, but not kid-appropriate by any means. Those books were real incest-y.
00:10:39
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ah Yeah, the first horror novel that I read when I was in fifth grade was Peter Straub's Ghost Story. Oh, nice, nice. Yeah.
00:10:50
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And since I was a fan of his when I was a little older, when I was 12, I picked up The Talisman with him and Peter, him and Stephen King. So that was the first Stephen King novel.
00:11:08
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that I read and I was reading a lot of Stephen King. um I was bored with V.C. Andrews. I read it. I didn't really like, I mean, and it was incesty, but um I think I didn't really, it was incesty, but I think that I had been reading a whole bunch of like when I was in fifth grade,
00:11:35
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um things like mythologies, like Greek, Roman, um Norse mythologies. okay There was a lot of weird stuff going ah is weird yeah i says these stuff going on ah in the mythologies too.
00:11:54
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am i Yeah, I think that's where we get things like Oedipus Complex from. So Maybe because I already read that stuff. I read this and I was like, wow, this is like weird.
00:12:07
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yeah that I would say the incest wasn't so much the selling point for me with the VC Andrews. It was very much trapped in a house of horrors and you're a kid, so you can't do anything about it.
00:12:19
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Like that was the the thrust of it for me. And yikes. Yeah, I did notice the incest and I thought it was weird. and Because um all of those books have ah like all the different stories. Because there's the Dallenganger one, which is, you know, Flowers in the Attic and all that there. Yeah. And Heaven Castile books.
00:12:39
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And they're all just, like, they're different and different kind of plots. But they all have to do with extreme, like, obscene wealth and incest. It's just everywhere in those things.
00:12:51
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Yeah, Flowers in the Attic is the one that I read. I did read that one. And at that time, I was reading like every like horror novel that my dad had that he cast aside.
00:13:06
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And I read some book called Mantis, which is um later got like um a reputation as being like the worst horror novel I've ever read.
00:13:20
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Oh, no.
00:13:22
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It's a book. about these ginormous praying mantises that attack and kill people. But for some reason, the praying mantises really want to chop off um like women's titties and eat them.
00:13:42
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like There's no really good reason for this. I mean, I guess they're soft and fatty. I don't really know. It's dumb, but it keeps happening over and over in this book, and that's just part of the reason why it's not.
00:13:57
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That is a very specific fetish. It is, and I mean, I was 12. I don't think I should have been reading that. Probably not. But yeah, my dad had a copy of The Joyous Sex. I read that, which at least that was informative.
00:14:13
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yeah I read the other one. I read the one that's called everything you always wanted to know about sex, but we're afraid to ask. okay I think more the more sarcastic version of of joy of sex.
00:14:26
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Cause it wasn't yeah joyful as like, Hey, what do you know about prostitutes? Here's some stuff. So it's. Yeah. then when I was, um, when I, it was 12 and a half and I had my period,
00:14:41
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how At that time, I was living with my father as a single parent, and he decided to send me to this, like, hippie camp thing that was a camp that was about what it meant to go through puberty. So, you know, we went over there, it was a puberty camp, and they're like, well, you know, this is your period. This is why it happens. This is what it means.
00:15:07
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um and it's okay to call it your period, but don't call it the curse because that's bad for this reason. And then they taught their abstinence theory, which was very hippy-dippy.
00:15:22
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So it was all based on the idea that masturbation was great, and we should all know about it and do that and not sex. So that was wow that was that time.
00:15:35
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That was what what happened. And also, that was a time when, that was like 1980, that was a time when the government decided that sex education in school was good and not bad.
00:15:49
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so We were really close to having federal sex ed standards at that time. We don't have them now, but they were really close to having them. i know. So we went to school and they taught us how to put a class condom on a banana.
00:16:06
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So we were learning about sex and stuff like that. And I mean, I do think that when people go to puberty, go through puberty, they need to know about it because otherwise people are going through puberty and their body is sending the messages and they, you know,
00:16:24
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need to understand what the hell's going on. Having a single dad, I'm sure he felt way out of his element, but as someone who grew up with their mom, I'm here to tell you that having a mom doesn't necessarily mean the talk is going to go well.
00:16:40
Speaker
Yeah, my mom was around um until like I was 11 and a half, and the only conversation she had with me was about how about toxic shock syndrome had just happened. So she had a conversation with me about rely tampons and about the dangers of tampons and why might want to use pads. So she explained to me that I was going to have a period and that, so I had that conversation with her.
00:17:12
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So when I had my period, I knew what it was and I was embarrassed to buy pads. I went right up to my dad and passed him to like, I mean, i don't want to like trauma dump and overshare, but why not? It's not exactly the secret.
00:17:26
Speaker
Yeah. um So um this is a long story, but my mom was in jail in a foreign country um be time between the time I was 12 and the time I was 18.
00:17:39
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oh My father ah was, my parents were divorced. And my mother was bipolar and bipolar also. and my Yeah, me too.
00:17:51
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Yeah, and my father was an addict.
Impact of Addiction and Mental Health in Family
00:17:54
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So um when um so my my mother's mother got cancer. And when she was dying of cancer, um my grandparents, my two grandmothers decided that thing to do with me to get her back together with my dad so she would be more mentally stable because of her bipolar disorder.
00:18:20
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. The problem was that my father had full fledged heroin addiction. So and they got her back together with my dad. Does it work that way?
00:18:30
Speaker
Yeah. And my dad took us all to Thailand, which, you know, my mom thought initially was something like a second honeymoon. But then we got there and my dad started having heroin withdrawals.
00:18:45
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um He sent my 11 year old brother out on a moped to go, or 10 year old brother, because mean, yeah, he wasn't 11 yet, out on a moped to go score him some dope in like Chiang Mai.
00:19:00
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And um they got a giant teddy bear. And um i was like, oh, this is cool. they got They got us a giant teddy bear. And then they took, then my mom cut the seams and then they just started shoving heroin in this teddy bear and sewed it back up.
00:19:20
Speaker
Oh my gosh. Yeah. So we were both, me and my brother were there. And so we go, start going back to the United States with this. And my dad's carrying the giant teddy bear and he's looking nervous and anxious as hell. And he's just sweating like,
00:19:38
Speaker
really bad and I told my brother that I thought my dad was going to get caught so me and my brother took the teddy bear and started laughing and playing with it and we took it through the thing because mean I was like 11 and a half and I thought that it was less likely we'd get busted we didn't get busted but um like I you know I peed in the bed until I was 7 or 8 and then I stopped peeing in the bed But after we did that, I started peeing in the bed again.
00:20:11
Speaker
I peed in the bed on the airplane. don't even know if I can smell again. Yeah, I mean, that's that's terrifying. thats I don't even know what to say. it's it it No wonder horror movies didn't mess you up.
00:20:25
Speaker
I mean, yeah, that's why I'm like, V.C. Andrews probably didn't mess me up. Right? I had a very traumatic childhood. I mean, I had a very traumatic childhood. And, you know, ah loved my parents so much. I still love them. I love my parents so much.
00:20:45
Speaker
They were really flawed, but I love them so much. sounds like there was some struggle there for sure. Yeah. I love both of my parents very much. But well but you it sounds like you and your siblings were never like taken away. No. At least one of your parents.
00:21:02
Speaker
No. um So this is what happened. um So when we were really little, um you know, my parents were married and they were fighting a lot.
00:21:14
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um There were things going on and I didn't know what was going on because I was really small. um But what was going on was like, okay, my mom, she was, um my dad was a Jewish dude and my mom was um black and they met in in college, right?
00:21:31
Speaker
Like he sat behind her in class and he decided that he had a crush on her. And one day her car broke down and he said, um you know, he would give her ride home.
00:21:42
Speaker
And then he said, I need to stop and pick something up from my mom's house um on the way. And my mom said, sure. And then he took her in there and he said, mom, this is the girl I'm going to marry.
00:21:54
Speaker
So I just used to her. So he was, yeah, he was older than my mother. Like, I think that when they got married, i think that she was 19 and he was 24 and she turned 20 like a month before I was born. arm And my dad turned, I think he was turned 26, like three months after I was born. you you know
00:22:26
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My mom was from like
00:22:32
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Watts, honestly, or later, later they moved to Compton. And my dad was like, he grew, he went to Hollywood High and went to Venice High. So they're from different economic backgrounds.
00:22:45
Speaker
And it was always like people were acting like my dad was going to save my mom. But my dad was this tremendous fuck up. So, and um, yeah, he was one of the, he went to, he was not, you know, he wasn't serving in the military during Vietnam. He went beef like he served between 60 and 64.
00:23:09
Speaker
um but he still was one of these people who, after the war came back in and started developing drug habits. That was kind of like, um,
00:23:20
Speaker
a theme um with with him and some of his siblings and I'm not going to get into what happened with the siblings. well But that's so popular. I don't want to use the word popular, but it's such a common problem with soldiers because they just don't get the mental health care that they need.
00:23:37
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Because you still have to function in the world. Exactly. So my dad was dealing with all that. And then my mother um She was bipolar. Her father um was diagnosed with schizophrenia um when she was like 12.
00:23:55
Speaker
twelve And then she became the person who really had to help her mother raise six children. So she very much had a ah parentified child um syndrome and she was responsible for her younger siblings. And her her mother you know probably had bipolar disorder.
00:24:17
Speaker
um Her father definitely had schizophrenia and my mother was diagnosed with bipolar. um I'm bipolar. My brother's bipolar. um It's so, you know, when we were little, um you know, my dad was doing things like cheating on my mother and getting high.
00:24:42
Speaker
And, you know, he started cheating on her when she was pregnant with me. And so he was doing a lot of mess. And my mother um was someone who um was hitting my dad.
00:24:56
Speaker
I mean, people don't really talk about domestic violence where the man is the is is is the one who's who's getting hit. But my mom, ah she would snap.
00:25:08
Speaker
And um one day she knocked my dad through, um like there a sliding glass door and she knocked him right through it. And I said, I'm like, I was a little kid, but I looked right at them and I said, I feel like you guys should get a divorce rather than to be fighting as much as you do.
00:25:26
Speaker
yeah And so they separated when I was like seven. So when I was little, um i remember my mom, like it wasn't like she was hitting me all the time, but every once a while she'd snap and hit me. So one time she hit me so hard, I flew up against the wall and fell down.
00:25:44
Speaker
it didn't happen all the time, right? There incidents throughout the whole time of me growing up when I remember something like that happening. So it didn't happen all the time, and but she would get stressed and lose control and she would hit me.
00:26:07
Speaker
um And one time she, like one time, when I was like 11, she went to take a taxi and she didn't have money. And then she went to, wanted to go to get the taxi to go buy a Versateller so she could get the money.
00:26:25
Speaker
And I blurted out something about her not having money because I'm a little kid. And this ended up in a thing where she was yelling at me in the bathroom and I started crying. And then when I started crying, people acted like she was being abusive.
00:26:37
Speaker
So she responded to that by hitting me and knocking me down a short flight of stairs and I got a black eye. Things like that happened.
00:26:47
Speaker
A lot of things happened. um A lot of things happened. I actually want to touch on something that you said because what you had said, your i forget the exact phrasing, but that she had lost control.
00:27:02
Speaker
She was not in control of herself. And normally people say that without really considering that like that doesn't happen in school. It doesn't happen in front of teachers. It doesn't happen.
00:27:16
Speaker
But I mean, what you're describing actually, because usually that's the case. We say, oh, the abuser lost control, but they only seem to lose control in the home with the family. You know, they're not losing control on their boss or their neighbor or, but, but somehow they lose control on the family.
00:27:36
Speaker
It's not true that my mom didn't snap in public. It's untrue. Okay, my mom was bipolar. Yeah, she was bipolar. Yeah, because my experience was very, like, my mom and I are both bipolar. I'm bipolar one. Yeah.
00:27:52
Speaker
and And that was my experience. So I tend to see through that lens. But it's interesting what you're describing, which is that she hit you right in front of other people in a public place. Like, that is, that's way outside my experience.
00:28:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I honestly think that it's not um unfortunate. I mean, I hate talking about this about the black community, but I do think it's not an uncommon thing in the black community.
00:28:20
Speaker
ah think that my mom, she got beat as a child. She was responsible for a whole bunch of people. She had, um like, her mom, like, if she she would, her mom would be combing her hair with a hot comb, and if she moved or she burnt her ear or mom got mad, her mom would hit her in the head with the...
00:28:38
Speaker
but grandma was throwing objects at people. he know So my my grandma was um hitting people. And the thing is, that like we came out of slavery and then ah got indoctrinated into like a version of Christianity that was heavy on things like spare the rod, spoil the child, because honestly, the version of Christianity that was being taught to black people was one that was um being used to control us as a race um because of slavery and then later after slavery just to keep us in line um because of the social oppression. And, you know, to this day you have black people who think that hitting their kids is going make it so that their kids...
00:29:30
Speaker
um stay in line and don't act up and don't get in trouble with authorities and don't get in trouble with the police. But I mean, studies show that hitting your kids actually makes your kids more likely to get into legal trouble because your kids are more likely to become violent because you've been hitting them. So, you know, it's a vicious cycle, but ah think that, yeah my mom, she would get very angry.
00:29:57
Speaker
You know, she would get very angry. And sometimes when she was getting, she would get very angry. She would fight with people. And, um you know, yeah. um She fought in school.
00:30:16
Speaker
I feel horrible because I'm talking about my mom. I i love my mom. Well, it doesn't sound like you're saying anything that's not true. so It's true. You know, I love my mom, but yeah. When she was in um high school, they called her bruiser. So she was somebody that was getting into fistfights and stuff. She had a reputation for it. My goodness. She did.
00:30:36
Speaker
And when she was really little, like ah like um two years old, they called her Snap because she was biting people.
00:30:46
Speaker
So she she she had to fight to stay safe. And she was just hypervigilant
00:31:00
Speaker
her her whole life. And the period of time when she was really, really, really, really really really not doing any of these things, because there was a whole period of time where that wasn't happening.
00:31:15
Speaker
she came from Thailand yeah she she came back from thailand
00:31:23
Speaker
like just before I turned 18.
00:31:28
Speaker
And I really wanted to have a relationship with her, but I didn't want her to have any authority over me. Right. And I knew I was going to be 18 really soon.
00:31:39
Speaker
um So i went out and met her right after I turned 18 because,
00:31:50
Speaker
you know, and She had been through so much. She had a like a stroke or something when she was in jail. And part of her face wasn't moving when she first came back.
00:32:06
Speaker
like It healed over time. like It kept getting better and better. But that was the first thing I remember when I saw her. um
00:32:19
Speaker
I feel like she didn't She did not deserve what happened to her at all. Sure, yeah. I feel like she i was 12 when she went to jail. she woed She went to jail just before I turned 12, like maybe three months before I turned 12. And I felt guilty when she went to jail because she was hitting me more and more when I started going through puberty.
00:32:48
Speaker
Like,
00:32:50
Speaker
When I started going through puberty, she was hitting me more frequently. And I was over there kind of praying that she would stop hitting me and stuff.
00:33:01
Speaker
So I felt like it was somehow my fault that she went to jail because I was praying for her to stop hitting me. And of course, it's not true. Well, no, but as a kid, it's all about how it feels and not how it is.
00:33:13
Speaker
Yeah, it just felt that way. And then my father... um decided that he was going to quit using heroin because he got custody of us.
00:33:26
Speaker
So he was actively kicking heroin. And I was over the ring. Did he really kick it? Yeah, he did. kicked heroin. kicked heroin so he could raise me and my brother.
00:33:40
Speaker
and then as soon as like my mom came back from Thailand and me and my brother Like, um yeah, like as soon as I turned 18 and my mom came back from Thailand, my dad just started getting high again.
00:33:54
Speaker
Like he just decided, oh, we were adults and he raised us. He could just go right back to Maryland. So, yeah, he did. I mean, to his credit, he did.
00:34:07
Speaker
He did quit so that he could raise us. But then, you know, I guess he filled like felt like he had raised us so he could just go back to getting high. Well, I'll tell you what, a lot of people that I met in in various like rehab situations were not there to get get clean for themselves. They were there to get clean for other reasons.
00:34:28
Speaker
And yeah the the counselors and stuff, they kind of treat it like it's all the same. Like, oh, it doesn't matter as long as you get clean. Well, that's bullshit. Because if you are getting clean for a specific situation and then that situation ends, that's really common, you know?
00:34:46
Speaker
Yeah. That's exactly what happened with him. Like as soon as we became adults, he went back to getting high and he qui get his he quit heroin again when um ah when my um oldest grand, ah my I mean his oldest grandchild, my my oldest niece was about um three or four.
00:35:12
Speaker
ah and But then the second time he quit, he had to get on methadone to do it. The first time he quit cold turkey and he was up in his room sick as hell. So I remember going in there and bringing him carnage and breakfast bars because it was all he could eat.
00:35:27
Speaker
And then, you know, it was, it was summer. I wasn't in school yet. So i was just sitting in there watching like Dr. Who with my dad who was sick because he was trying for heroin.
00:35:39
Speaker
And then, and I was, um, oh regressing you know was upset i was in a regressive state i had them buy me all these like barbie toys and then i snuck out to a um a a pet shop and bought some mice and then have my mice playing with the barbie well that that is delightful i love that
00:36:11
Speaker
Okay, if we can change gears a little bit, do want discuss the term Afro-surrealist. Now, how is that different from your garden variety surrealism?
Understanding Afro-surrealism
00:36:23
Speaker
um So Afro-surrealism is um surrealism that involves um the African diaspora. um And, you know, lately there's been a lot of...
00:36:38
Speaker
conversation about Afro versus African, because if it was African surrealism, then it would be um specific to the continent of Africa, but this is African diaspora.
00:36:51
Speaker
Toni Morrison is the most famous Afro surrealist in literature and um a lot of um what would be considered to be Afro surrealism um There's crossovers with that in magical realism.
00:37:10
Speaker
um Yeah, but with magical realism, it most often is um really um very directly tied into things like mythologies and things like that.
00:37:24
Speaker
um And with Afro-surrealism, that's not necessary necessarily the case. It may be, but it's not necessarily the case in It obviously comes from surrealism as an art movement and surrealism in general.
00:37:39
Speaker
But when you think about something like um Toni Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye, I mean, that is a terrifying story. That is it a story about a lot of childhood trauma, hu childhood trauma writ large.
00:37:58
Speaker
um And it is a story where um it's hard to really tell what's really happening and what's hallucinations because you have a very, very unreliable narrator.
00:38:14
Speaker
um And so, um again, these are really stories that are rooted in the experiences of people in the African diaspora, so that's how they differ from surrealism in general.
00:38:30
Speaker
see. It's definitely a subset of surrealism as a genre. Okay. Now, you've actually mentioned mythology a couple of times. I want to ask if you're familiar with a particular book called The Goddesses in Every Woman. It's by Jean Shinoda Bolin.
00:38:47
Speaker
And it actually, it's her the book is her master's thesis, and she goes through the different goddess archetypes and applies them to different types and scenarios of of women and family ah structures.
00:39:04
Speaker
So like if you are in Athena and you are active and aggressive and assertive, How does that manifest itself if you have a family that supports that versus if you have one that doesn't support that?
00:39:17
Speaker
And it just it goes through all the major archetypes. It's pretty swell, actually. I'll i'll send you a link. Okay. Because I do love mythology as psychology. That's like a hot topic for me.
00:39:30
Speaker
you know Yeah. Magic as psychology. Just the whole why did we do that? how did How does that all fit together with like, you know, why is it still relevant now? That sort of thing. yeah Yeah, I feel you. I'm going to say that i tend to veer away from all kinds of pop psychology for a lot of reasons, but let me say that my mother had a degree in psychology so why and ah was very involved with a lot of things like that. so
00:40:01
Speaker
A lot of times I see these things and they're little triggery for me, so I don't get as involved as other people. I'm just floored by the idea of a psychologist that didn't get to the lesson on why it's bad to hit children or or anyone really. Because the what the thing that always makes me laugh is when people say, i respected my parents because they hit me.
00:40:25
Speaker
and I can't think of a time ever in my life when I respected someone more because they hit me. I mean, yeah, I would have been afraid of them or dislike them. Yeah. Or yeah. I mean, I can remember being five years old and wishing my mom would die.
00:40:42
Speaker
and Yeah. I never wished my parents would die. Um, well, ah think that like, um I tried to run away, though. um So I did try to run away, and and then I ended up coming right back.
00:40:57
Speaker
um I didn't, like, I mean, yeah, fear isn't the same as respect. And I was afraid of my mom when she was, um you know, would do things like hitting me.
00:41:09
Speaker
And then, you know, my mom was a fun mom. I mean, both of my parents were fun parents. Like, when my mom wasn't acting like that, she was a fun mom. and She would take us on adventures. She would We did all these cool things.
00:41:20
Speaker
We did all these cool things with both of my parents, but, you know, there was the one i nodding out negligent parent and the other, you know, might snap and get violent parents.
00:41:31
Speaker
So, Well, and that's the thing, that if you have parents that are just bad and you know you can't trust them, you can't confide in them, you shouldn't, you know, trust them at all, that is in some ways easier than dealing with the parent that sometimes they're awesome and sometimes they're just a hell beast and you don't know which one you're going to get because it's a skill, you know? I imagine you have this skill.
00:41:55
Speaker
just like I do the skill to be able to tell when someone is going to get angry or when a situation is about to go off. Like you develop all those senses as a kid. Yeah. You have to develop those skills.
00:42:07
Speaker
And I mean, i don't know if it's better or worse because I never had the other kind of parents. So I didn't write like, how would you know? your how yeah yeah Never went through that. um I will say that,
00:42:19
Speaker
um you know, it, italy It leaves you with a lot to unpack, honestly. um Yeah, I feel like um me and my mother were super codependent and that I couldn't like fully like start some portions of my adult life until after my mom passed away because we were so codependent.
00:42:47
Speaker
And maybe if my mom had been just like a horrible person that I wanted to cut off completely, I wouldn't have spent as many years in a codependent relationship with her as I did. But there was always that side of my mother that I really loved.
00:43:05
Speaker
And we were really close too. um And you know stuff, but yeah, um I think she she she became a psychologist because she had a mental illness and because her father had a mental illness and she wanted to understand herself better.
00:43:23
Speaker
So she tried to understand herself better, but you know, part of codependency, the issue or problem of people that are codependent is they'll go and they'll study all that stuff that they're supposed to be using to help themselves.
00:43:37
Speaker
And then they'll be trying to fix everyone around them and not fix themselves. <unk> be Right. now So it's, the it's always the other people. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, and that's why I have like, i take all that kind of pop psychology stuff but with a grain of salt because I see all kinds of flavors of it in the world with people that are not necessarily out there being like, um like there's there there's there's there's there's there's a there's lighter, lightweight flavors of it, like
00:44:14
Speaker
love love people there There are there way too many people that are just using pop psychology to come up with like reasons why all of their exes are toxic and messed up.
00:44:26
Speaker
And like whenever people say that, I'm like, do you know what codependency is? Have you looked at your actual personal you know Anybody can fall for an abuser shenanigans, but if all of your exes are crazy, if everyone in your life is you know some kind of abuser and and you're the only one that's blameless, yeah, that definitely time to take a look at that.
00:44:53
Speaker
let's see I mean, anyone can fall for an abuser shenanigans, but at the same time, if you have a history of you know, growing up with the kind of stuff that you grew up with or i grew up with, o then learning how to protect yourself
00:45:19
Speaker
is a good idea. oh yeah Like that's not blaming you. It's not victim blaming. It's not saying that it's your fault that bad things happen to you. It's just saying that developing some skills like life skills to try to protect yourself is something you can control because you can control.
00:45:42
Speaker
You can't control these other people. You can't fix them. Trying to fix them is definitely a mistake. You're not going to fix these people. They're not going to get fixed by you. The only way they're going to get fixed is because they decide to fix themselves and go out there and fix themselves.
00:45:57
Speaker
We cannot fix these people. And when you try to fix them, then you just end up, you know, that then, you know, like for me at least, you know, um i couldn't fix my parents.
00:46:08
Speaker
Okay. I was not going to fix my parents and I'm not going to fix someone else that I'm in a relationship with. It's never going to happen. And that's just going to be the glue that holds this dysfunctional relationship together as you're in here trying to fix this person.
00:46:24
Speaker
And I think that, I mean, There's nothing really wrong with the psychology, the pop psychology, as long as you're not, as long as you know it's pop psychology and you're not taking it like too seriously. Because it's like people's astrological signs.
00:46:45
Speaker
You know, like partner princess is a cancer And every time I read or see a thing about cancers, it's like princess is a stereotype of everything they say about cancers.
00:46:59
Speaker
Yep. And my dad was a cancer and it's not exactly the same with my dad, but I can sort of see it, but it's not exactly the same, but it just happens that princess is very much like all these things they say about cancers, right?
00:47:14
Speaker
oh But that's the thing about sun signs is that there's 12 of them. There's a lot of people. So it does get a lot more, because sometimes someone's sun sign does not make any sense. And then you look at the full chart and it's like, oh, right. me Yeah.
00:47:31
Speaker
And like, I just have and a healthy amount of disbelief on all these things. I mean, I'm not going to tell people not to believe in them.
00:47:42
Speaker
But I'm always looking at them with just a layer. There's an overlay of this might not be at all true. and for me If you look at psychology the same with with the same type of of lens that you look at physical health and and physical medicine, you wouldn't read a book and then use that to treat yourself physically.
00:48:06
Speaker
you know You would ask a doctor. But with psychology, a lot of people seem to think that you know any anying kind of like psychotherapy or bad medication, like all that there, people want to just reason their way through it.
00:48:19
Speaker
And it doesn't work that way. Yeah, when you go into see it through it. Yeah, when you go to see a doctor, you have somebody whose job is to try to help you figure these things out.
00:48:32
Speaker
And when you're doing it yourself. You don't have that guidance, but I also think that um psychology as a practice is different than pop psychology. Pop psychology, I mean, people have ah hard time understanding that pop science is not the same thing as science practices that are not the pop culture variant. Like people are super duper, duper, duper. Like usually what happens with pop psychology is people read a blog.
00:49:14
Speaker
They don't read books. bull Sometimes they read books, but a lot of times they're just reading a blog. Like when people talk about generational theory, right,
00:49:26
Speaker
um a very, very minuscule percentage of the people talking about generational theory have ever read a book on generational theory.
00:49:38
Speaker
But they're talking about it with a lot of authority. Right. And that's what I'm saying. They few things about it. No, I think i think that's absolutely true. you're Yeah. on pierre Yeah, they know a very few things about it.
00:49:51
Speaker
Well, and the the internet just makes that rampant. It's like, well, I read a thousand words on it. What do you mean I don't know as much as a doctor? Like, well... I got 100% right. I read it i read a WebMD article. I read a blog.
00:50:07
Speaker
I saw podcast. and know That's the thing is that like if you're a doctor, that has got to be infuriating to have people coming in all the time pretending that they know more than you do because they have a little bit of information that they got from ah source that may be reliable, may not, you know. Because that's such a huge problem right now with information that people believe nonsense because they don't know how to tell the difference. And it is terrifying.
00:50:37
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it's, I would say that some of these things, I wouldn't like, I wouldn't classify things like that are, um i want to try to not use the wrong phrase for these things because it's not,
00:50:56
Speaker
exactly pseudoscience. It's little bits of science that are mixed together with a whole bunch of things. that are basically mythology and are not scientific.
00:51:09
Speaker
They're like, memes that like, religion it's like, let's distill this extremely complex thing down to three sentences, make it digestible for everyone, and then teach it as a life philosophy.
00:51:22
Speaker
Well, no, it doesn't work that way. That doesn't help individual people get better with the things that they're struggling with. But yeah, i think also people don't know when things are a religion.
00:51:34
Speaker
Astrology is a religion. It's an ancient religion. It literally is a religion. That's what it is. It's not psychology and it is a religion. So um I'm not saying that people shouldn't practice astrology.
00:51:49
Speaker
People practice all kinds of religions. But practice it as a religion and not say a science. Right. It is a religion. It is not. There's nothing scientific about it.
00:52:00
Speaker
It is literally a religion. That's what it is. So, um yeah. And, you know, um and and it's OK for people to have spiritual or religious practices. But people are um I think a lot of people are confused and they don't really.
00:52:20
Speaker
Am I still here? Yeah. They don't really know the difference. So that's my opinion on that. Well, that's because people want to teach their religion in school like it's history class. And that's, oh gosh, don't get me started on that, please.
00:52:34
Speaker
Oh my God. I feel like, you know, when I was in school, we learned about mythologies. And I think that people feel like their own religions aren't mythologies.
00:52:49
Speaker
Like they're only mythologies when Other cultures are practicing them. Yes, I remember being on a date. I was dating. Actually, I was dating my boss at the phone sex company.
00:53:01
Speaker
And so it was already kind of a weird situation. And I happened to use the phrase Christian mythology. in front of him well actually wait it wasn't even that i said something i referred to mythology and he scoffed at mythology and i was like oh well i'm talking about pagan mythology as opposed to christian mythology and he was so upset that i would use the term christian mythology and he started lecturing me on how it was true and it was so important and the bible was so important and again it's my boss at the phone sex company so ah yeah i know
00:53:37
Speaker
I know. I feel like, yeah, Christians are very touchy. I think it's really obvious that like Samson and Delilah is is a mythology that's a myth. that you know That's a myth just like the story of Psyche and Eros is a myth. and and i mean you know Some people can't really deal with things like that. The Arthurian legends are myths.
00:54:05
Speaker
but like If Orfeo and Euripus had a talking snake in it, people would, you know, they would recognize that as a myth. And yet when you have a talking snake in the Bible, somehow it's like, oh, well, but obviously, in you know,
00:54:20
Speaker
i won't kind a liberal I won't pretend to understand Christian literalism. Like my husband is Christian. Right. He's the kind of Christian that uses the words of Jesus to help him make decisions that make him a better person. Like that's that's who he is.
00:54:39
Speaker
Right. Why his religion works for him. And that's, you know, why I find it tolerable, because i don't want to say like, I don't like hanging out with Christians, but I don't like hanging out with fundamentalist Christians who make their Christianity everybody else's problem.
00:54:56
Speaker
Yeah, I would say I'm very lapsed as a Christian and that I've been going to Jewish religious services lately, but I'm not really a Jew. um Maybe I sort of am because I'm half Jewish and I'm going to Jewish religious services.
00:55:12
Speaker
But then there's like an overlap in a bunch of those mythologies because they we share some religious texts there. um But, you know, um yeah, when people are practicing a religion,
00:55:27
Speaker
Yeah, and let me put it this way. there' It's called mythologies no matter what religion it is. Those things are called mythologies. Yeah. And, you know, all those things about, ah mo like we were we were talking about Moses and and um the Pharaoh and the plagues. And, you know, yeah, when when you're talking about all that stuff, those are mythologies.
00:55:50
Speaker
And in people not liking language. is is yeah is a thing. um Yeah, this country is is currently in a super duper duper like magical thinking regressive period of time.
00:56:08
Speaker
So even as someone who has practiced, um been a practicing Christian for a good half of my life, I would say more maybe.
00:56:19
Speaker
Yeah, probably more. um I feel like the political situation in this country is scary because of a lot of Christian literalism. Yep. you know? Yep. Yeah, a whole bunch of people take Christianity very literally. People are talking about things like demons and woke mind virus as if they're real things that are actually impacting people.
00:56:43
Speaker
And the whole demon thing freaks me out, man. I met a woman years ago in a rehab, and she used to talk about seeing demons. And for a while, we agreed that this was a symptom of her mental illness, and she believed there were demons. Yeah.
00:56:57
Speaker
and that she could reason that they weren't real but she also thought she could see them. And I thought it was really interesting and I liked talking to her about it because I was so fascinated by the concept.
00:57:09
Speaker
And then one day she told me that my husband had a demon inside of him and that I should do something about it. And I said, okay, I'm out. This is no longer amusing in any way.
00:57:21
Speaker
But I was so floored at the idea that there are adults walking around in society, driving cars and having jobs and believing that other human beings had demons inside of them. That is terrifying. That's like serial killer shit.
00:57:37
Speaker
I'm going to say this. So I want to say this as a person who has, um you know,
00:57:47
Speaker
A mental health condition that makes it so that i have hallucinations like that. um Yeah. ah People that have psychotic features or psychosis or hallucinations, that doesn't make us like serial killers or anything like that.
00:58:06
Speaker
You are correct. That is not what I tried to imply. i Well, I must have phrased that very clumsily because, no, I'm sure that all people that have delusions are not potential serial killers.
00:58:17
Speaker
Right. But a lot of people that are serial killers do have delusions. I think there's a whole bunch of, I mean, going to say this and I'm going to word this carefully because I want to make sure that my intention here is clear. Okay. Mm-hmm.
00:58:34
Speaker
um There are many, many, many people in churches and religious environments that will say that people are possessed by demons. And I have been accused of being possessed by a demon by a neo-pagan that was in no shape or form a Christian.
00:58:52
Speaker
I got accused of being demonically possessed by ah couple of neo-pagans for...
00:59:04
Speaker
reasons of my mental health symptoms and because I'm allergic to fragrances. so my fragrance allergies mean that I can't be around burning incense or frankincense.
00:59:18
Speaker
ah So Christians are not the only ones who have magical thinking paranoia about demonic forces and someone being allergic to incense or frankincense definitely does not mean that they're demonically possessed.
00:59:36
Speaker
And if someone has schizophrenia or um they have schizoaffective disorder or they have bipolar disorder with psychotic features, which I have, and you see them talk to themselves, them talking to themselves does not mean they're demon infested.
01:00:00
Speaker
And probably part of the reason that I have really, as a person who has been really very religiously connected my whole life, because I have a tendency to feel that there is a spiritual world that exists, but I've had to take a more pragmatic doubting view, honestly, for my own protection because of my mental illness.
01:00:29
Speaker
Because I'm really not trying to see myself as someone who's dealing with demons. These are not demons. These are mental health symptoms. Okay. yeah Yeah. These are not demons. But, you know, I do talk to myself.
01:00:49
Speaker
All right. Yeah. And so what I want to say is the people like me that are mentally ill, that talk to ourselves are one category of people and the people like that person you saw in the hospital are another category of people.
01:01:07
Speaker
And religious people might be impacted by people that are mentally ill because um there's a lot of thought that the woman who came up with the idea of the rapture was someone who was who had a mental illness, right?
01:01:23
Speaker
Mm-hmm. But then there's a whole bunch of people who do not have a diagnosed mental illness who believe in a whole bunch of these mythologies. So how do you deal with the fact that there's a bunch of people who have no mental health issue that we're aware of who are televangelists who are running gigantic churches They're telling people that they're possessed with demons.
01:01:46
Speaker
Well, and I mean, i think in the case of televangelists, they're lying. They're just lying for money. I mean, I don't know these people, but that seems like the most likely explanation.
01:01:59
Speaker
You know, it's like with these fucking Republicans, they're lying and you keep saying, well, how do you reconcile doing this with your life and then supporting this legislation? Oh, they're, they're just bullshit, you know?
01:02:10
Speaker
And I don't think that that's true of, uh, the majority of people, but the people that make it a business. Yeah. It's just crap. I don't know. I don't know those people.
01:02:23
Speaker
ah do know that a lot of people have magical thinking. and they believe that they believe in magic, and they believe that magic is real, and they believe that magic is real to such a degree that they think that their magical thinking justifies taking any number of positions with regards to other human beings, and that's where it can get dangerous, okay?
01:02:49
Speaker
I have magical thinking too. um i Sometimes I'm thinking, you know, Oh, astrology, that sounds great. And I'm on a Pisces Aries cusp and that means this, this, this, this and that. Right.
01:03:02
Speaker
um Sometimes I'm thinking, um you know, God, I love that for me. You know, I love that. What is it? The Florence and the Machine so ah song, you know, big God, I need a big God.
01:03:17
Speaker
You and the editing know, have you ever heard that song? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Like she's being really sarcastic because she's hurt, you know?
01:03:29
Speaker
and know in and she's like, you know, is this this a part of the process? Because Jesus Christ, Jesus Christ, it hurts. You know, sometimes I feel, you know, sometimes I feel like a Christian.
01:03:46
Speaker
But as a Christian, i just feel like there's a separation of church and state. For a reason, because we left, you know, England to have religious freedom and not so that people could take their dogma from their religious practice and their mythologies and use that as an and like excuse to oppress people. And although some of the people that are out there oppressing people might have mental health issues like I do, um in my experience, most of them are perfectly saints.
01:04:26
Speaker
And it's easy to... Well, that's the thing. We want to get into this space where we assume that people that do terrible things must be mentally ill. And that's, I think, a tough trap to fall into because, you know, being cruel, being an asshole, not dealing with your own personal shit doesn't necessarily mean you have some sort of organic mental illness.
01:04:49
Speaker
You could just be bad. Yeah. I mean, people don't want to deal with basic, like, facts of human nature. People want to think of human beings as more pure than we are.
01:05:04
Speaker
People don't want to question things we do. Like I have friends that are vegan and I'm not vegan and I eat meat. And when my friends talk about the cruelty of the meat eating industry, you know,
01:05:20
Speaker
that It's tricky because, you know, they make a lot of sense. but They're making a lot of sense. But you can't necessarily, like, we all have to decide where those lines are. Like, I think most people believe that slavery is wrong. If you did a poll, everyone would say we shouldn't have slavery.
01:05:37
Speaker
But then we have iPhones and chocolate and Hemu and things that, like, we know comes from slave labor. Right. And yet we're not going to do without electronics because how do you live in the world like that?
01:05:53
Speaker
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. we all have to find those lines for ourselves. I remember recently i got scoldy with someone that I normally respect a great deal. I don't know if you are familiar with T. Thorne Coyle, the writer. She's a fairly famous witch who studied under the gardeners.
01:06:12
Speaker
And she had a new book out. And i she there was a Facebook ad. And I was like, I'm sorry, you gave money to Zuckerberg? And the thing is that I had decided ah over a year ago that I was going to stop giving money to Zuckerberg.
01:06:27
Speaker
So my whole mindset was like, oh my God, why would anyone give money to that Nazi, blah, blah, blah. And I was really judgy with her. And she shot back at me and was like, oh, you know what? I gave him $15 to hype my book. So friggin what?
01:06:42
Speaker
You know, really? You're going to judge me for that? And I was like, oh, yeah, that's that's me being an asshole, isn't it? Yeah. Because I had like no problem just being like, well, I don't agree with with what you did. So I'm going to say in this public forum that I think you're wrong and fuck it.
01:07:01
Speaker
That's fucked up and you shouldn't have done. And, you know, I was way out of line. and And so I had to yeah take the schooling on that. Like, oh, yep. Nope. You're right. That that was me being fucked up.
01:07:13
Speaker
Yeah, I think it's hard for human beings in in general, like is not what I'm going to say. human beings in American culture, we're taught that individualism is just like this important part of American culture.
01:07:28
Speaker
And part of that is us having a very, very, very strong reluctance to being wrong. It's just part of American culture and the internet is is creating an in amplified echo chamber of our overall desire to just be right all the damn time.
01:07:47
Speaker
Well, and that's why i make such a point of not just surrounding myself with the smartest people that I can, like the most insightful people, but I really invite and encourage people to tell me when they think that I am wrong.
01:08:02
Speaker
Yeah. I may not always agree, but I definitely want to hear the viewpoint. you know Yeah. don't know everything. I haven't met everyone. i need i need the information that I don't have.
01:08:14
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, I'm um not always good at hearing that I'm wrong, but um I can hear it. i don't like it, but I can hear it. No, I definitely want to get into your work.
01:08:25
Speaker
um Personally, one of my most pervasive fears is swarms of things. Like, even good things. If there's, like, too many puppies or too many butterflies or something, I don't like it. It's too much.
01:08:37
Speaker
So, with that in mind, how scared will I be of the Rat King? Um, but it's poetry. I feel like... Well, it's not like poetry cannot be terrifying. I think we all know that it can.
01:08:53
Speaker
Yeah, poetry can be really scary, but think, like, sort of, like, Jordan Peele meets Edgar Allan Poe. Oh. In terms of scariness level.
01:09:08
Speaker
Okay. So conceptual, moody, vaguely. yeahing Yeah. The the title um story. so that So I want to put out that the Rat King was nominated for a Ram Stoker award, but I think you have an older version of my bio. So I wanted to,
01:09:29
Speaker
put it out there that there's a newer book, Melancholia, which is currently nominated for a Bram Stoker award. So I don't want leave that part out. Uh, but the rat King title poem is, um it uses the analogy of the rat King, which, um, do you know what rat King is?
01:09:48
Speaker
Yes. Right. Yeah. So it's like, a bunch of rats that are caught together by the tail and then they have to live together. uses that analogy to talk about a group of homeless people that are out there dying in the cold.
01:10:01
Speaker
um And you know, how people get stuck together in community and they have to live and die together in these harsh conditions. So it's told from the point of view of a ghost of a homeless person talking about what happened to that person's community.
01:10:23
Speaker
So <unk>s it's not really like a cryptid tale. um It sounds like it's going to be about a cryptid, but it's, it's actually about the ghost of some, of some homeless folks.
01:10:36
Speaker
Wow. Yeah. That still sounds scary if I do, if I do say so. Yeah, it is. um and I think that that book has another um thing. i forget.
01:10:50
Speaker
ah um I think it's called um No Alien is Illegal. And it's a like poem that's about um a hu about a ah ah person ah person of color driving through a sundown town.
01:11:09
Speaker
And the um there are some racists trying to lynch the person. But at the same time, there are aliens in a UFO that are in there doing things like um bisecting cows and stuff like that. And, you know, while wow the um the um you know oh while the person of color, I think it's a black person, is trying to escape the sundown town.
01:11:43
Speaker
um And I think maybe the the the the racists are also um chasing after illegal immigrants and stuff. um The aliens are chasing them. So the aliens are killing them up. And and that's that poem.
01:11:59
Speaker
It seems like kind of a similar vibe to Lovecraft Country. am i Am I getting that right? um That poem, yeah. In that particular poem, yeah. Okay.
01:12:09
Speaker
There's another one in there. that's about some people who decide it's okay to have a plantation themed wedding and they get cursed.
01:12:19
Speaker
if You need to.
01:12:24
Speaker
like Wow. They thought it was harmless, but no, they got cursed. So there's some poems like that in there. Yeah.
01:12:34
Speaker
And so it's not really cryptic centered as you might think based on the title. Okay. Alright. Actually... Wait.
01:12:46
Speaker
So what was your first Stoker nomination? The Rat King. and Okay. And then Melancholia was the second one. Right. Wow. Melancholia is currently nominated.
01:13:00
Speaker
So have to wait until June to find out whether or not it won. And it's got some stiff competition. Yeah. All... five of the nominees in the poetry category are people of color this year.
01:13:15
Speaker
Oh, wow. That's awesome.
01:13:18
Speaker
That is awesome. Yeah. Sorry, I'm just looking over my list to see what else we want to talk about. Now, actually, i wonder if you would not mind giving us a short primer on neo-pronouns, because you've already demonstrated you know a whole lot more about this than I do, and you also use neo-pronouns yourself.
Exploration of Neo-pronouns
01:13:41
Speaker
Yeah, so um so I'm non-binary. I'm also gender fluid, which is a slightly different thing. So non-binary means that you don't identify strictly with um you know either of the binary genders of male or female.
01:14:06
Speaker
ah that could mean that you just do not identify with either one of them. um Or it could mean that you just don't strictly identify with either one of them.
01:14:19
Speaker
And it's something else. Gender fluid kind of means that it, I mean, i don't want to say it depends on the day, but like it varies, right? Yeah. It means it, gender fluid means that it varies. So in my case, there is some variance there.
01:14:35
Speaker
Um, so I would say that, um, some days and might be presenting in a more masculine way than other days. i might be presenting in a more feminine way.
01:14:51
Speaker
And also, regardless of how I'm presenting or how I look, I might be feeling in a different way. And in my personal case, I would say that when I was a really little kid, like when I was, you know, like four or five, my really early memory memories, I really did not feel gendered.
01:15:13
Speaker
So that's agender. So when I was little, i was agender. I didn't understand why people kept trying to put this thing called gender on me. People kept trying to make gender a thing, and I didn't understand why.
01:15:28
Speaker
um And I think that when I was a bit older than that, like when I was nine, ah started actively questioning if my gender was what was assigned at birth.
01:15:42
Speaker
And I would do things like um put on, yeah i was assigned female at birth, I would put on male clothes, ah sneak around in the boys bathroom, walk around with my brother and try on what would it feel like to be a guy. And this really continued um until I was about 19 years old, the actively questioning, is it possible that I'm a dude?
01:16:13
Speaker
um And when I was 19, I was doing things like, well, at that point in time, if you were ah cha a man,
01:16:28
Speaker
uh, or a trans woman, because they really only talked about binary trans people. um what you would do is you would live your life in the gender.
01:16:41
Speaker
um so you would socially transition for two years cause you to do that when you could do any medical transitioning. So it went as far as me
01:16:53
Speaker
you know, starting to do things that were like social transition things. But then I was only doing them part of the time, which makes sense. I'm gender fluid and not binary.
01:17:05
Speaker
So I would be out there part-time social transitioning. And after a while... theyve do I mean, was that something, did you have support or was that something you were just doing on your own?
01:17:18
Speaker
I mean, I was in a relationship with someone who um was into cross-dressing. so So since I was in a relationship with a cross-dresser, i think that he probably, i mean, he was supportive.
01:17:32
Speaker
He might not have fully understood the difference between that and cross-dressing. So maybe that felt like we were both cross-dressing them. um But like- Cross-dressing is an activity, right? Like drag. It's just, it's a thing that you do.
01:17:49
Speaker
as opposed to being an identity. Right, as opposed to an identity. Although, to be fair, um a lot of times people that have been cross-dressing come out as gender-fluid or non-binary these days.
01:18:02
Speaker
So although it's an activity that you do, um as more awareness of the existence of gender-fluid people, non-binary people, and just genderqueerness of any sort,
01:18:18
Speaker
ah the more that that is ah is is is is something that people are aware of, the more you have people that are, um you know, coming out and saying, hey, actually, i am non-binary.
01:18:33
Speaker
I'm genderqueer. The thing is, people say, like, you know, it's like with autism. People say, well, why are there so many more cases now? Well, because we understand it, and people know that it's an option, you know, before people understood about being trans or being, and be they just felt wrong and they didn't know why.
01:18:51
Speaker
And they went through their whole entire lives, maybe never meeting or knowing another person who felt the same way, you know, writing exactly such a tragedy because it only takes a little bit of information to say, Oh, okay.
01:19:07
Speaker
That's what's going on. And yeah it's like a late in life diagnosis. Where you just find out that like, oh, you had autism the whole time or you had ADD and no one told you or you're bipolar or you know, you're lactose intolerant, like whatever it is. It's like, oh, this thing that's been fucking up my life.
01:19:26
Speaker
I finally understand what it is. And now I have a basis on which to do something about it. whether Yeah, I understand.
01:19:39
Speaker
or to say, you know what, I'm going to get this thing treated so I don't have to deal with it or, you know, whatever. Having the knowledge is always better than not having it. Right.
01:19:50
Speaker
And you're close to my age, so you probably understand some of like what it was like then, right? Yeah. So when I was a teenager, ah you know there was a lot of um people playing with gender roles that were pop stars.
01:20:06
Speaker
So some of those people really actually were genderqueer, genderfluid, or transgender people. um but not all of them were. And so at that point, people were just like, oh, well, you're gender bending because that's what people thought that was um because of like Annie Lennox and, you know, Boy George, you know, boy George is a gay femme and gay femmes that present in a very
01:20:40
Speaker
Feminine manner like that can i yeah identify in a lot of ways. Some identify as genderqueer. Some actually identify as non-binary.
01:20:52
Speaker
Some just don't. They just identify as cisgender and are dressing that way. And some of these...
01:21:03
Speaker
the piece, some drag queens are a thing, but there's a whole drag queen to trans woman pipeline. So some of the drag queens turned out to actually be trans women.
01:21:15
Speaker
um So, um like, Marilyn, which was another pop star at the time, was a person who was, was was in fact, trans, you know, was, in fact, um what nowadays you would have maybe called something like non-binary.
01:21:33
Speaker
But in those days, it was like there was only a binary trans person. So if you weren't... strictly binary, then it was like they weren't counting you among the trans. You know what I'm saying? And in the 80s, there were a whole bunch of people who were um very much not conforming to um binary gender roles. I think I mean mentioned Marilyn Boy George. um Grace Jones.
01:22:08
Speaker
Even people like Prince were pushing back against binary gender roles by saying, hey, a man and I can wear all this makeup. I can wear all this purple. I can wear all these lacy sleeves.
01:22:24
Speaker
um So there was a lot of that happening then. So I think that people contextualized it with what they were seeing in pop music a lot. Yeah. Well, and even...
01:22:37
Speaker
people that were not necessarily cross-dressing. I mean, glam rock in the eighties, all those weird, like, you know, metal, like poison. And the you know, the guys with like, they were, wanted you to know they were straight.
01:22:51
Speaker
They were super, super straight. Right. Head to toe and leather, long, fluffy hair, way more makeup than I would ever wear to go out, you know? yeah exactly.
01:23:03
Speaker
So everybody's trying new things in the eighties, which is funny now because there are so many people our age that are like, well, men were men in my day and women were women. And it's like, okay, first of all, Grace Jones could kick all those guys' asses. Let's start there.
01:23:17
Speaker
But, you know, plenty of people were experimenting and figuring things out and just, you know, splashing out. I mean, David Bowie, like, how would you even put a label on that?
01:23:28
Speaker
He's just being him. Right. Exactly. Exactly. And it is funny that people like, I'm like, it's like, did you exist in the same age that I did? Cause like, we what are you even talking about? Right. now
01:23:45
Speaker
And, um, and so i came out as bisexual when I was 18 and that added another layer of complexity because while I was experimenting with gender prior to coming out as bisexual,
01:24:02
Speaker
I had a lot of people, including my own cousin, in fact, who were like, well, what this means is that you're a dyke. This means you're a lesbian.
01:24:13
Speaker
Because like, you know yeah, because gender and sexuality couldn't exist separately. So if I was running around with short hair in, um,
01:24:27
Speaker
genes and suspenders and band t-shirts and dressing like a little skater dude because that was my aesthetic.
01:24:39
Speaker
like I think I had combat boots. I was dressing in a punk rock fashion that was ah fashion that people thought of as masculine.
01:24:55
Speaker
i was dressing like you know, like a little punk rock dude or a little skater dude. i had really short hair or I had a mohawk. i had a mohawk a lot of the times too. Well, you know, I've seen your pictures online. I am aware that you still dress like that.
01:25:09
Speaker
Yeah. and I can show you some pictures of me when I was a teenager in and you'll see what I'm saying. So people couldn't understand that my gender existed separately from my um sexual preference. So, you know, from the time I was like,
01:25:28
Speaker
you know, a younger teen, like 13, 14, 15, they're like, oh well, this means you're lesbian. This means you're lesbian. I am not a lesbian and I am bisexual. And when I came out as bi at 18, it was like for some people, it was like, oh, well, this verifies what I've been saying the whole time. this gender stuff means that you're a lesbian.
01:25:49
Speaker
And no, it's actually two separate things. It's my gender and my sexuality because sexual orientation and gender Not actually the same thing. Yeah, I didn't understand that for the longest time. And when Billy Martin, the writer, announced that, you know, they were transitioning, i didn't, I was confused because I had an idea in my head that if you're transitioning, the goal is to be straight, like to be whatever the dominant societal, yeah you know, sexuality is.
01:26:25
Speaker
So I didn't understand like, okay, wait, but you were a girl and now you're going to be a guy. And see already that part's wrong. So I was already like not fully understanding that no, they've always been a dude, but when they were born that no one noticed that. So they, they went the other way.
01:26:43
Speaker
So I didn't understand like why you would basically make yourself gay. it was the mindset that I had yeah, Then, you know, people had to, like, explain it to me and I read some stuff about it that, like, no, that they're separate. They don't ah really have anything to do with each other and that the goal is not to present as one gender or the other and then be attracted to the opposite gender. Like, that's not part of it. That's not necessarily what anyone is going for. And I didn't get that because I think I knew two gay people growing up because I had an aunt
01:27:21
Speaker
who left the convent to marry a woman. yeah But we weren't supposed to talk about it. Oh, I i said to marry a woman, no, to to live with a woman, of course, they couldn't get married because it was the But we weren't even we weren't supposed to talk about it. Nobody was supposed to mention that we knew that they were gay. And so I didn't have a frame of reference. And then, you know, they tried to make us Catholic for a while. So by the time there were people that I could ask about that sort of thing,
01:27:49
Speaker
they were telling me the Catholic version of it, which was not particularly welcoming. Yeah. I think when I was a little kid, i didn't know too many gay people. And I think that when I was like, um, you know, maybe nine um My mom had a close friend who was bisexual but was closeted for religious reasons.
01:28:15
Speaker
And that was the first time I really got to know adult that was queer. um But I think that like... um I knew something was up with my gender from from a really early age.
01:28:32
Speaker
And it's funny because i didn't figure out that I was bisexual until after I went through puberty. Like I knew that that I liked guys, um you know, when I was, you know, um prepubescent, like, you know, when I was nine I definitely knew that I liked guys, but I was like 15 before I figured out that I liked girls.
01:28:59
Speaker
um Like I was watching um Cat People, the one with Natasha Kinski and- Speaking of incest, right? and Yeah, speaking of incest and Malcolm McDowell.
01:29:13
Speaker
And I just, you know, suddenly realized that I was hot for both of these these actors. I'm like, okay. There they are naked.
01:29:25
Speaker
Yeah. Oh yeah. They were in there naked. I mean, I'm sure that was not a coincidence about why i I figured out that I was hot for both of them. Well, and that's only because of our age, because if, if we were 10 years younger than it would have been the mummy.
01:29:40
Speaker
Because everyone references Brendan Fraser's Mummy as the movie that made them bisexual because all of the men and all of the women are just so beautiful and on display.
01:29:51
Speaker
um Yeah. Well, for me, it was it was cat people. And I'm into, um i am definitely, I'm kinky. I'm into BDSM.
01:30:03
Speaker
ah And, ah you know, Natasha Kinski's in bondage in this movie. no Okay. ah That definitely it did did have something, that had something to do with it.
01:30:16
Speaker
Like that did have something to do with me suddenly really understanding that I was bisexual. like It was a moment. I mean, when I was ah a a a little prepubescent person and I saw Enter the Dragon and they had had those little knife things and they scratched Bruce Lee on the chest, I felt a thing.
01:30:40
Speaker
And I was like, what the hell? What is this? What am I feeling here? So, yeah, that those things were happening. So, yeah. So I came out as bi when I was 18 because I was sitting in front of a nightclub and a ah super cute skater girl came up to me.
01:31:03
Speaker
And she said, um you know, have you ever thought, like, I was i was i was having a conversation that didn't involve her bitching about my love life. And then she came up to me and she said, have you ever thought of dating women?
01:31:17
Speaker
And I looked at her and I said, no but if you're asking me for a date, then I think I should start to right now because you're high. ah how And that was my first girlfriend. That is fantastic.
01:31:31
Speaker
Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, um, but back to Neo pronouns. Cause you asked me about that. I use they, them pronouns and I also use Z here pronouns.
01:31:45
Speaker
And the fact that Z here pronouns are called Neo pronouns is hilarious to me because these pronouns have been a lot around for a long time.
01:31:56
Speaker
they're like the toga of new clothes. Um, um, the what I mean, it's like a Viking word, right? um I don't know that it was a Viking word.
01:32:10
Speaker
ah Is what a Viking word? Z in here? Well, here. while here um yeah i was not familiar with Z at all, but here is like, it's a word that I encountered when I was reading about runes, so I assume old school Germanic, and then you had commented on it recently as well.
01:32:29
Speaker
I do think that they're old school Germanic pronouns. I think that that's correct. But Z here pronouns have been around um since at least 1864 and possibly have been around since 1780s. Okay. Since the 1780s.
01:32:49
Speaker
Okay. They've been around for a long time So they're not really new. um So gender neutral pronouns.
01:33:05
Speaker
um Before people decided that ah they, them pronouns were acceptable gender neutral pronouns, um there were there was a long history of other pronouns and Z-Zer or Z-Hear pronouns are not the oldest one but they are some very old pronouns.
01:33:33
Speaker
I think Thon is the oldest one, in fact. So um the history of they-them as a gender neutral pronoun is also interesting, um especially since so many people um push back against that based on grammar.
01:33:53
Speaker
Well, that's so weird, because first of all, MAGA people pretending that they care a whole lot about grammar on the internet, sorry, nope, not buying it.
01:34:04
Speaker
I'm familiar with MAGA grammar, and they're not sticklers. Yeah. But also, we all know how to use those in the singular. We do it all the time.
01:34:15
Speaker
My new boss is coming in tomorrow. Oh, really? When will they be here? We know we're talking about one person. We know what it means when we say they. And right know people that suddenly want to pretend that we don't know that are, I mean, i just, I wish people would admit that they're just big assholes. Like, why is it so hard to admit that? Like, oh yeah, I'm a bigot. So what?
01:34:39
Speaker
Just, just instead of pretending you have a grammatical objection to treat someone with the respect and dignity that they're asking for. I know.
01:34:50
Speaker
So they, them pronouns have been used as singular pronouns for a very, very, very long time. They were used in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as a singular pronoun back in 1386.
01:35:05
Speaker
That's a real long time. ah And they're in Shakespeare's Hamlet as singular pronouns. um back in 1599.
01:35:16
Speaker
So um it's been, um you know, like, what's that, like 800 years? It's been a real long time. So um they they're they're used they're used as singular pronouns in um Pride and Prejudice.
01:35:33
Speaker
It's been a long time. um The current popularity of they, them pronouns as gender-neutral pronouns um came about um because of feminism, um because there was a practice of listing people of an unknown gender as he, him.
01:35:59
Speaker
And since you're around my age, you might remember in the 70s when we were little kids, when they were arguing about how to change textbooks to make it so that they were not just saying he him when they didn't know the gender.
01:36:17
Speaker
So some people thought the approach was to just change and have different genders in there and not always he, him. Some people did the really awkward, uh, shahee thing, which it was C slash H E. Yeah. yeah Right.
01:36:35
Speaker
And some people said to go with they, them, you know, So, um you know, and so this was actually pushed back against using the male gender whenever, you know. So the practice of using the male gender pronouns to describe someone of a nonspecific gender started in the 18th century, and it's a sexist practice.
01:37:03
Speaker
So people brought back they, them pronouns, which was what was used previously. And that's how they, them pronouns became ah gender no neutral pronoun.
01:37:15
Speaker
And another um small thing I'd like to say on that, I have a friend who's German and in Germany, ah it, it's like it pronouns are used for people rather than they, them pronouns when it's, you know, as a singular non-gendered pronoun.
01:37:34
Speaker
Okay. But in the United States, in American English, There's a lot of negative association with it its pronouns.
01:37:45
Speaker
Well, yes, it sounds dehumanizing. Right. It sounds dehumanizing because we only use that singular pronoun for animals. We don't use it for humans. That's the way we distinguish humans from animals.
01:37:59
Speaker
Therefore, it feels dehumanizing to us because of r the way we use language. So that's a no. Okay. Yeah. So, yeah, Z here have been, pronouns have been um a lot around ah for a really long time, but I guess they're they're neo because they're newer than they them.
01:38:21
Speaker
um So, thon is another old gender gender neutral pronoun, which is from Scots term, yon.
01:38:34
Speaker
And that one has been around since 1858. So some of these pronouns that they're calling neo-pronouns, what I'm saying is are over 100 years old.
01:38:48
Speaker
um And they're so they're not really that new. So maybe we should call them garage sale pronouns because they're not new, but they're new to us.
01:39:00
Speaker
We're digging them out and using them because aren't they? Some gender pronouns, some gender, so they do actually have new neopronouns.
01:39:11
Speaker
So I don't want to say that all neopronouns are older ones. But some of the really, really popular ones are ones that have actually been around for a long time.
01:39:25
Speaker
And they were popular. They were more popular than they them up until probably around 15 years ago when they them pronouns started taking um
01:39:39
Speaker
over. You know what I'm saying? so um but there are ones that are just really, really, really, really really new. Like my partner has pronoun set, B-Bimboz, which is a,
01:39:55
Speaker
the a pun on bimbos. So ah the be bimbos, bimbos. So some of these are are actually, you know, really are new.
01:40:09
Speaker
um And, you know, there they although you there are um like
01:40:21
Speaker
theoretically an endless number of neo-pronouns that could exist, There are just you really um a limited number that are really popular. Faith and fear is another really popular set of neopronouns.
01:40:36
Speaker
Okay. Now, I definitely want to get into um some some things about community and and politics, if that's okay. Okay. Okay.
Finding Supportive Communities
01:40:49
Speaker
We do talk a lot about ah the importance of community on the show and you in particular, like I'm kind of getting a greater understanding for you because I know that you've built a community in a lot of different ways. Like, and that, um, I guess my first question is what, how would you advise someone who does not have a supportive community around them? How does someone go about finding their people?
01:41:16
Speaker
Um, so I want to clarify what you mean by community. Well, I'm talking about um the connections that we make outside of family that are close, whether it's for projects, but like having um people around you that understand and support you and that that's communal.
01:41:35
Speaker
Yeah. is I mean, like like me, like I went no contact from my family in my 20s. And, ah you know, so I also had to sort of build my own new family, but I didn't.
01:41:49
Speaker
you know, it was kind of sporadic and it took a long time. And I wouldn't say that the way that I went about it is anything that I would recommend, but you actually see more together than I am in a lot of different ways. So I would like to hear what you have to say about finding your people.
01:42:08
Speaker
Yeah. Well, I mean, um I'm, I'm 57 and my mom died, um, just, um, before I turned 51. So i think the community I have now is a community that I built after my mother died.
01:42:25
Speaker
So, um you know, would say that I was older by then and I had had a lot of life experience before that. So it's not like I went out into the world and set out to build community and really um had, you know,
01:42:45
Speaker
just, yeah, I was already older by then. and I had been part of many communities. and I would say I'm still part of many of the communities that I was a part of when I was younger.
01:43:01
Speaker
so when um i was um really like a kid, um i was really quiet and soft spoken shy.
01:43:16
Speaker
and introverted in artsy and sat in the corner at the library and at the, um you know, cafe and at the cafeteria getting bullied a lot.
01:43:31
Speaker
And the first time that I really became like a part of a community was um the punk rock community.
01:43:43
Speaker
Um, so, ah my cousin Gina came out from, um, l LA to live with us in Hawaii and she's like a year older than me.
01:43:55
Speaker
And I started running around with her and we started going, um, out to the punk clubs and we were little, you know, we're like 13 and 14 years old. yeah So we were really little.
01:44:06
Speaker
Um, and you know, there were things that I liked to do that were more introverted things. Like there was a, um, like video gaming was popular and I was really into video gaming and there was a big, um, like arcade giant gaming arcade called the fun factory. And I would drag Gina down to the fun factory to play video games. Cause I liked doing that.
01:44:30
Speaker
But me and my cousin went out and we started to find this community together. But after a while, um, it really became a thing where Gina was like a super popular person.
01:44:43
Speaker
And I was a less popular person that was her cousin for a lot of reasons. um Gina's Jewish and white presenting and I'm biracial and Gina was thin.
01:45:00
Speaker
And honestly, people treated me like I was fat, but only weighed like 140 pounds. I wasn't really that big. You I had pimples, whatever. So um there started to be um a thing where I maybe wasn't fitting in socially with Gina's friends as much.
01:45:21
Speaker
And um then I started hanging around a couple of um gay boys, um Mark Sanchez and Mike McElhaney.
01:45:32
Speaker
So I went and got my own friends and they were some gay men. And, um but they weren't men, they were they were gay children because we were all children. and then ah
01:45:46
Speaker
we were goths. So then I started hanging out in the goth community. So that was like when I started moving away from my cousin and I started hanging out with the goths more in the punk rockers less. And I would say,
01:46:05
Speaker
that there was an intermediate period between that where I was just alone um with my Walkman headphones on listening to like um ah Joy Division and being surly.
01:46:18
Speaker
oh and I forgot my brother was a punk rocker and he was hanging out with us and our punk rock friends. So I was still part of the punk rock community, but then I was also hanging out with the goths. And when I started hanging out with the goths, it started to be where had my own sort of like,
01:46:35
Speaker
social identity that was very separate. um So when I moved to San Francisco, I became a part of the goth community here really quickly.
01:46:47
Speaker
And I would say that the goth community was my main social community that I was plugged into um in my 20s as well. um And I think that
01:47:06
Speaker
joined Carista Consciousness Church, which was a... um I would say that it it did show up in the Cult Awareness Group book as being mostly harmless.
01:47:25
Speaker
um I would say they were mostly harmless, but they did sort of um pressure people to get sterilized, and um I couldn't have kids because...
01:47:36
Speaker
I had endometriosis and I was going to to have surgery for a big ah ovarian cyst and then they kind of pressured me to get my tubes tied and they got kind of cut and burned. But other than that, that was probably the most culty thing that they were doing.
01:47:50
Speaker
They were um a polyfidelity group and so they had like group marriage. So I would say that um I'm not going to say that that's an ideal way to to build community, but I joined that group.
01:48:05
Speaker
So that happened. And I was there between the ages of 19 and 23, i think. So that happened.
01:48:19
Speaker
um And when I rolled out of that, I just went back to, um i mean the whole time I was there, i was still a punk rocker and a goth, and I was still going the see punk shows and goth shows and going to goth clubs.
01:48:37
Speaker
So I rolled just right back out into like the punk and the goth scene again. Okay. um Well, I mean, it sounds like yeah there's a lot to glean from that, first of all.
01:48:49
Speaker
you can be part of more than one community. And if a community is not like meeting all your needs, you don't have to stick around. Yeah. I learned a lot from, um from, I learned a lot from being able to leave communities.
01:49:09
Speaker
Karista broke up and when it was breaking up, um, things got more and more like less controlling because it was in the process of falling apart.
01:49:25
Speaker
And I was one of the people who joined it near the end. And so like in the last maybe year that it existed, me and one of the other like really younger members um ah who went by Hope, ah we got like to have our own group that was like our own like BFIC, which is what they call, forget what that was called, best friend identity cluster or something.
01:49:57
Speaker
It was a little group marriage thing. We had our own one. And that meant we had our own apartment, which was really awesome. And I think that um for like a year, year and a half, we we were up in there, we had our own place.
01:50:15
Speaker
And it was really awesome. And then people would come through and they would try to join our group and other people passed in and out and didn't really stick. So it was just kind of me and my um bestie getting to be awesome roommates and having fun a lot.
01:50:32
Speaker
And then the then the commune broke up. um And when it broke up, I went and actually got a place with my mother um after that. So me and my mom got a place together.
01:50:44
Speaker
um I think that when I was um in Hawaii, um after I broke up with my girlfriend, had a boyfriend and my boyfriend was not monogamous.
01:50:57
Speaker
And he said, you know, we could have a monogamous relationship, but it won't last very long. And if you want to have a longer relationship with me, then we should have, ah you know, like a polyamorous relationship.
01:51:10
Speaker
And I didn't know what polyamory was, so I didn't want to do it. But then after we broke up, I kind of regretted it and I was like, maybe I should have tried it. So I think that that kind of made me more open to wanting to try it.
01:51:22
Speaker
So I did. um ah tried it before I got in Karista and I tried it in Karista. I tried it after Karista. So I was actually non-monogamous.
01:51:38
Speaker
from an early age and I was non-monogamous on and off throughout my adult life. So that was just part of what was going on with me. um i think that when Karista broke up and I was able to go back to like the punk in the goth clubs and stuff like that.
01:52:00
Speaker
um I think I was dating a lot of people that were like gutter goths and gutter punks. AKA people that were homeless and marginally housed.
01:52:12
Speaker
And they had something called SF net, which was like, um they had ah table top um like computers that you could dial into and talk to people. Okay. Yeah.
01:52:26
Speaker
yeah And this was pre-internet. This was from like 1991 to So I got on this dial up BBS called um SFnet and that ended up being another place that became like one of my main social circles.
01:52:44
Speaker
So it was pre-internet, but it was like we were connecting online and then we would have like these in-person um get together meetups. um I'm still friends with a bunch of my friends from SFnet.
01:52:57
Speaker
I'm still friends with a bunch of my friends from the goth ah clubs dating back to friends that I have had from high school since high school. So, um honestly, my, you know, the the the goth community, i mean, i so still a part of the punk community, but not really in the same way. I'm super integrated in the goth community. So I would say that the goth community was my first and most like longstanding
01:53:30
Speaker
group of um like social group. And I think that when I moved away from the punk community towards the goth community, it became a safe place for me to be queer because the goth community just had way more queer people.
01:53:49
Speaker
um Like when I was 18 and I was a young goth, Uh, I had like baby bats already, like little kid goths that I looked out for. and one of them was a trans girl that was 13, you know?
01:54:05
Speaker
So by then I definitely had a lot of friends that were gay, um, and trans and stuff like that. So I feel like the goth community was a much more queer space than the punk community.
01:54:21
Speaker
The punk community can be really, um,
01:54:26
Speaker
A lot of these punk bands have gone full on red MAGA hat over the years. It seems like every day I'm finding out about somebody new that went MAGA and it's just gross and disappointing.
01:54:44
Speaker
It's not like it hasn't happened to people in the goth community because like there's Morrissey. like In the punk community, it just keeps happening nonstop.
01:54:56
Speaker
ah There's, ah yeah, ah you know, Johnny Rotten is... Yeah, i was just going to say, you know, John Lydon, like, broke everyone's heart, and we probably should have, like, at that point.
01:55:10
Speaker
I mean, that that's a trust-no-one kind of thing. Like, oh. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. X-Scene from X. ah There's just, like, so many of them. Honestly, it's just gotten to the point where You just expect it at this point. Is there an amount of money that makes people just do that suddenly?
01:55:33
Speaker
I feel like for John Lydon, that was the case, that it was the amount of money. ah no one in X has any money. There are who' still more. and just They just went the libertarian route for that.
01:55:46
Speaker
And that happens. And in the case of Morrissey, he's always been a bigot. Like we just didn't understand that the national front disco was not ironic and he wasn't making fun of the national front. He was actually a member of it. Like we could have known he was a bigot.
01:56:10
Speaker
I mean, maybe he was English. So, and you know, we were Americans and we didn't understand that. that is this thing know I always knew Morris. He was a dick because he said such mean things about fat people.
01:56:25
Speaker
And that's always a tell. If you go out of your way to insult fat people, you are almost certainly bad in plenty of other ways. i I'm going to say this. All the things that he said about fat women, i understood that differently.
01:56:40
Speaker
um i understood that as him saying, I'm a totally ripped, studly gay man. And how can you be with that fat woman? How dare you?
01:56:52
Speaker
So I'm like, okay, you're gay and somebody hurt you and whatever. Yeah, whatever, dude. um So I probably took that the same way as I would take it if, um like like, I agree with you, it's bigoted.
01:57:09
Speaker
So you're not wrong. You're absolutely correct. But one time when I was in a punk band called Poetic Justice, when I was 18 years old,
01:57:20
Speaker
years old um We opened for another band and the other band's lead singer jumped up and complained about how her boyfriend just left her for an ethnic girl.
01:57:35
Speaker
And I'm like, you know what, bitch? You know what, bitch? ah You're opening for me, right? You're opening for me.
01:57:48
Speaker
you make it very clear that you're trying to not say something that you want. very right Yeah, exactly. You know, you just said something super racist and you, you know, think that saying ethnic makes it not racist, but you're mad. Cause you know, you got dumped for a fucking woman of color and I, you know, bet it's really, really chafing your hiding and hurting your ass that, you know, you gotta open for me.
01:58:14
Speaker
So, you know what? Fuck you, bitch. You're opening for me. Kiss my fucking, kiss my, you know, chubby black ass.
01:58:24
Speaker
Just kiss it. And like, I was just like, okay, Morrissey is really pissed off because, you know, from his point of view, he wanted to be in relationships with a bunch of men.
01:58:36
Speaker
And some of these guys that he wanted to be in relationships with, um you know, maybe they were in the closet and they were gay. or maybe they were bi and they got with a woman and then they got with a woman and he's talking shit about how um she's fat.
01:58:52
Speaker
To me, it just sounds like a zillion like songs, like, like, like hip hop songs. Like, um ah like what's that song? um Like, um Oh God.
01:59:04
Speaker
um I feel like it's Kesha or something. um It's like, um ah with when The one where she's going I hate you so much right now And in the song she's like ah why you know Why not me Why the hell her She's so raunchy and vulgar And I'm like you're jealous So you're talking shit about the other woman I'm like Morrissey is just Talking shit about The other woman She's bad like okay whatever Dude
01:59:41
Speaker
yeah It's hard think of a way in which Morrissey is not just a little bitch. Morrissey is just, yeah, Morrissey is a problem on a stick and it's too bad because he did actually mean something as an out gay man, you know, at a time when being an out gay man, topping pop charts was just not a thing.
02:00:08
Speaker
And I feel bad because I know that there's some gay men and there's some gay gods and gay alternative rockers. They have very, very, very like broken, hurt, mixed feelings about um Morrissey. And I'm not going to tell them not to like Morrissey because he did really represent something as a gay man. when he His song, and I hate saying anything positive about him because he's such a douchebag.
02:00:36
Speaker
He's just super racist. he he he He said that the reason that he didn't win Top of the Pops in 86 was because of the so-called Jamaican conspiracy.
02:00:47
Speaker
His song... a rush and a push and the land will be ours. It was once before and it will be again, whatever. Like when, you know, we were kids and we're listening to that and we're like, oh, wow, this is probably something really cool about how like Native Americans should take but back America. Yeah, I definitely
Controversies and Public Perception: Morrissey
02:01:08
Speaker
thought it was fighting the man stuff.
02:01:10
Speaker
and Right. No, it's about how England needs to be for white people again. That's what it's literally about. and and you know and And I feel like we just really like, we yeah, we thought he was thought he was he was going to stick it to the man.
02:01:26
Speaker
But when you listen to it and you know that this dude is ah is ah is a dyed-in-the-wool racist, he is just saying England needs to go back to being for white people. and he's like And he's like, and people uglier than you and I. and I'm like, dude, whoa.
02:01:43
Speaker
Yeah, he's a racist. he He said, like something, you know, like he he he he said he said a lot of horrible, super racist things, ah some of which I'm just not going repeat. So the dude is a douchebag. He's like just really messed up, you know, on a lot of levels.
02:02:05
Speaker
But when I listened to the song, Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others, It's like after talking crap about fat women for years and years and years, he came out with this song that really just shows that on a certain level, he is also relating to the fat women because he starts talking about some girls are bigger than others.
02:02:30
Speaker
And then he's talking about, he's like talking about crying and saying, lend me your pillow, the one that you came on. And he is really actually talking about the ways that he as a gay man is experiencing some things that are the same as what these fat women are experiencing in terms of being with guys that want to hook up on the down low and treat you like crap.
02:03:02
Speaker
And I'm like, you know, that came out later when he was a solo artist. so I do think about that and and, you know, yeah, I do think that about what he says about fat women. Okay.
02:03:22
Speaker
Yeah. I can see where you're coming from there. Yeah, but he's still um a racist douche and he just really is. And, you know, he put on a little weight and he is so like just upset when anyone calls him like fat.
02:03:38
Speaker
He was like so upset because the South Park thing mocking him showed him as being fat. Yeah. yeah
Playful Mad Libs Segment
02:03:46
Speaker
the recent episode My goodness. hum He deserves that. Yeah, I agree. I agree. I mean, i I don't like to as a rule body shame. But if you're a big body shamer who puts on weight, I'll probably make a crack or two.
02:04:01
Speaker
Right, exactly. Like, he's not that big, but he just is, you know, he got older like the rest of us. then And he cannot handle that. All right. Well, we are about out of time. um it is actually time for the Mad Libs. So I hope you're ready for that.
02:04:18
Speaker
um Okay. We're going to start with some nouns. Look like I need one, two, three, four, five singular nouns.
02:04:30
Speaker
Five singular nouns. Yep. um Cat. um Dildo. um Spider monkey.
02:04:45
Speaker
um Vampire. and werewolf.
02:04:54
Speaker
Okay, now I need one, two... three, four plural nouns.
02:05:09
Speaker
Cocktails.
02:05:14
Speaker
Boogers.
02:05:19
Speaker
Turds.
02:05:24
Speaker
Microphones.
02:05:27
Speaker
Okay. I think that's all of them. Alright, and so then we need a color. Black. A place.
02:05:41
Speaker
Milpitas. What is it? Milpitas. What is that? It's a but it's this city in the Bay Area that has like a problem with... like You know how people have like dump sites?
02:05:58
Speaker
So their dump site was done improperly and it gives off a bad smell. So there's a web website called Milpitas Smell.
02:06:09
Speaker
It's all about the stench that comes out of Milpitas. Well, I learned something today. Yeah, it's between here and San Jose.
02:06:21
Speaker
Okay. All right. So I need a celebrity?
02:06:27
Speaker
Um... Wow. Um, Kendrick Lamar. Nice.
02:06:39
Speaker
He's one of those people that I learned about semi recently because I like to make it a point to know everybody that's making MAGA people rage. Yeah. was Like this song is really good.
02:06:52
Speaker
Wait, is that a joke about pedophiles? Yeah, he's all over Drake. Like, okay, that explains why manga people don't like him. Well, that and, you know, being black.
02:07:04
Speaker
um I need another celebrity. um Laverne Cox.
02:07:13
Speaker
Okay. And an adjective? Fabulous. Fabulous.
02:07:22
Speaker
Actually, it looks like I need one, two, three more adjectives.
Podcast Conclusion and Thanks
02:07:28
Speaker
Rainbow. Okay.
02:07:38
Speaker
Girthy.
02:07:41
Speaker
one more.
02:07:44
Speaker
Inflamed. And finally, i need an exclamation.
02:07:52
Speaker
Jeepers!
02:07:56
Speaker
Alright. this is say This is called Right Through His Legs is the name of it. Oh no. Yeah, this is a bunch of sports ones I think we're in right now. um Because I don't pick out a good lib, I just go do them in order from my big giant book.
02:08:13
Speaker
It was game six of the Cat Series in 1986. The Boston Black Cocktails... were tied with the Milpitas Boogers in the bottom of the 10th inning when Kendrick Lamar stepped up to the plate.
02:08:30
Speaker
There were two outs and a dildo on third. All Boston needed was one more spider monkey to bring home a victory.
02:08:41
Speaker
Laverne Cox, a fabulous sinker ball pitcher, threw a terrific vampire. See that? I can believe. Getting the batter out should have been as rainbow as 1-2-3, but the ball went right through the first baseman's turd.
02:08:57
Speaker
Oh, turds. Cries of, oh no, and jeepers were heard throughout the stands. The player on third raced home and scored the winning werewolf. To this day, girthy baseball fans still talk about that game and the inflamed loss for the red microphones.
02:09:16
Speaker
Oh no. I know, right? Yeah. The turd-covered ball, that's probably why they lost. It's probably connected to the Milpitas smell. Right? Nobody wanted to touch it after that.
02:09:29
Speaker
Samiko, I am so glad that you could be here and we could have this conversation. This was great,
Sponsor Mention and Support Links
02:09:33
Speaker
and I learned so much. Yeah. It's always nice for me when people are patient with my ignorance.
02:09:39
Speaker
It's the only way I'll learn. Okay, cool. i hope i I hope I actually answered your question about community because I feel like I rambled there, but hey. No, i think I think that's a lot of a lot of good information, and i think that I hope that people will get something from it. I'm confident that they will.
02:09:58
Speaker
um Oh, you know, I actually didn't ask you um if you have an audio sample because sometimes we do have audio samples um at the end. If you have like a short story read or, you know, anything that you want to share with readers, we can add it to the end of the episode.
02:10:13
Speaker
Yeah, i can give you an audio some sample. I have a bunch of them. Awesome. So, yeah. So, wait for that at the end of the episode, listeners, and you will find it.
02:10:25
Speaker
And we will see everybody next week. Just want to remind you before we go that we are sponsored by Sometimes Hilarious Horror Magazine. And you can find us on Ko-Fi.
02:10:36
Speaker
That's ko-fi slash sometimeshilarioushorror.com. Supporting the magazine is a great way to support us here at the podcast. All right,
Reading from 'His Flesh Was Haunted'
02:10:45
Speaker
so we'll see everybody next week.
02:10:47
Speaker
Hi, this is Miko Salson, and this His Flesh Was Haunted from my 2021 collection,
02:10:54
Speaker
Within Me, Without Me.
02:10:58
Speaker
his flesh was haunted from my two thousand twenty one collection within me without me The rest of the home is empty now, except for the one who survives, remembering them all as he wanders the halls, breathing life into walls.
02:11:23
Speaker
In the simmering sun where the dead become one with the flesh of their host more distended than ghosts. In the blistering deep dive only he is alive.
02:11:38
Speaker
fingers roughly grazing dance across the ash of circumstance thin cobweb wisps of memory the dead became his enemies vessel flesh that is left behind still sucking up the warm sunshine In an ancient home once touched by fire, Wherein his family did expire, Into the grave they won't retire.
02:12:09
Speaker
The dead are emotional vampires. His grief-consumed heart is exhumed To feed the needs of those who wait, Wearing no bodies of their own, And so bemoan their gruesome fate.
02:12:26
Speaker
Their love much hungrier than hate, and as he lives they take. He gives his skin a suit, parasitical, acute, infestation by those whose lost presence he wanted.
02:12:44
Speaker
It was thus through his love that his flesh became haunted.